Linkage versus leverage: Rethinking the international dimension of regime change

Comparative Politics

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 379-400

  Levitsky, Steven ^a   Way, Lucan A ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b TEMPLE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748567150     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20434008     Document Type: Review

References (104)

1. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991);
2. Laurence Whitehead, ed., The International Dimension of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);
3. Geoffrey Pridham, Eric Herring, and George Sanford, eds., Building Democracy? The International Dimension of Democratization in Eastern Europe (London: Leicester University Press, 1997);
4. Jean Grugel, ed., Democracy without Borders: Transnationalization and Conditionality in New Democracies (London: Routledge, 1999).
5. See Harvey Starr, "Democratic Dominoes: Diffusion Approaches to the Spread of Democracy in the International System," Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (June 1991), 356-81;
6. Jeffrey S. Kopstein, and David A. Reilly, "Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World," World Politics, 53 (October 2000), 1-37;
7. Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1995);
8. Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, DC.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999);
9. Joan M. Nelson and Stephanie J. Eglinton, Encouraging Democracy: What Role for Conditioned Aid? (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1992);
10. Gordon Crawford, Foreign Aid and Political Reform: A Comparative Analysis of Democracy Assistance and Political Conditionality (New York: Palgrave, 2001);
11. Judith Kelley, "International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership, Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions," International Organization, 58 (2004), 459;
12. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
13. Ann M. Florini, ed., The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (Washington, DC.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000).
14. This framework builds on Geoffrey Pridham, "International Influences and Democratic Transition: Problems of Theory and Practice in Linkage Politics," in Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991);
15. Barbara Stallings, "International Influences on Economic Policy: Debt, Stabilization, and Structural Reform," in Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, eds., The Politics of Economic Adjustment: International Constraints, Distributive Conflicts, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Whitehead, ed.; Kopstein and Reilly.
16. See Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy, 13 (April 2002), 51-65.
17. We are undertaking such testing as part of a larger research project on post-cold-war competitive authoritarian regimes.
18. Richard Joseph, "The Reconfiguration of Power in Late Twentieth-Century Africa," in Richard Joseph, ed., State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
19. Nelson and Eglinton.
20. Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, eds., The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005);
21. Kelley; Tom Farer, ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
22. Diamond; Carothers; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, eds.
23. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
24. Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, "The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction," in Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, eds., pp 18-32.
25. Larry Diamond, "Thinking about Hybrid Regimes," Journal of Democracy, 13 (April 2002), 30-31.
26. Carothers; Crawford.
27. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 55-56.
28. The term "electoralism" was coined by Terry Lynn Karl, "Imposing Consent: Electoralism versus Democratization in El Salvador," in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (La Jolla: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, 1986).
29. Nelson and Eglinton, p. 35.
30. Thomas Carothers, "The Observers Observed," Journal of Democracy, 8 (July 1997), 17-31.
31. Diamond, "Thinking about Hybrid Regimes"; Levitsky and Way.
32. Kopstein and Reilly; Andrew P. Cortell and James W. David, Jr., "Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms: A Research Agenda," International Studies Review, 2 (Spring 2000), 73-74.
33. Javier Corrales, "Lessons from Latin America," in Leslie David Simon, ed., Democracy and the Internet: Allies or Adversaries? (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002), pp. 38-39;
34. Ann M. Florini, "Lessons Learned," in Ann M. Florini, ed., The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), p. 221;
35. Kathryn A. Sikkink, "Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America," International Organization, 47 (Summer 1993), 435-36;
36. Thomas Risse and Stephen C. Ropp, "International Human Rights Norms and Domestic Change: Conclusion," in Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, eds.;
37. Ann M. Florini and P. J. Simmons, "What the World Needs Now?" in Florini, ed., p. 7.
38. Chris Alden, "From Neglect to 'Virtual Engagement': The United States and Its New Paradigm for Africa," African Affairs, 99 (2000), 355.
39. Examples include France's role in Cameroon and Gabon, Russia's role in Armenia and Belarus, and South Africa's role in Zimbabwe.
40. Nelson and Eglinton, p. 20.
41. Crawford, pp. 210-27.
42. Gordon Crawford, "Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality: Issues of Effectiveness and Consistency," Democratization, 4 (Autumn 1997), 73-80.
43. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
44. This definition builds on Pridham, "International Influences and Democratic Transition"; Whitehead; and Kopstein and Reilly. This conceptualization differs from Rosenau's; he defines linkage as "any recurrent sequence of behavior that originates in one system and is reacted to in another." James N. Rosenau, "Toward the Study of National-International Linkages," in James N. Rosenau, ed., Linkage Politics: Essays on the Convergence of National and International Systems (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 45.
45. Chetan Kumar, "Transnational Networks and Campaigns for Democracy," in Florini, ed.
46. Jeffrey Herbst, "The United States and Africa: Issues for the Future," in John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothchild, eds., Africa in World Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 165-66.
47. Geoffrey Pridham, "The Politics of the European Community, Transnational Networks and Democratic Transition in Southern Europe," in Pridham, ed., Encouraging Democracy, pp. 220-25.
48. Philip Mauceri, State under Siege: Development and Policy Making in Peru (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 89.
49. Thomas Carothers, "Ousting Foreign Strongmen: Lessons from Serbia," Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief vol. 1 (2001).
50. See M. Steven Fish and and Andrej Krickovic, "Out of the Brown and into the Blue? The Tentative 'Christian-Democratization' of the Croatian Democratic Union," East European Constitutional Review, 12 (Spring-Summer 2003), 104-12.
51. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "The Changing Nature of World Power," Political Science Quarterly, 105 (1990), 181.
52. Crawford, pp. 203-4.
53. Maxwell A. Cameron, "Self-Coups: Peru, Guatemala, and Russia," Journal of Democracy, 9 (January 1998), 125-39.
54. Keck and Sikkink; Risse and Sikkink.
55. Few authoritarian regimes existed in such countries during the 1990s. Mexico and Taiwan may most closely approximate such conditions.
56. Levitsky and Way.
57. They are Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Benin, Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
58. Benin, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Guyana, Mali, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Romania, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, and Taiwan. All cases scored as democracies are rated "free" by Freedom House in 2004.
59. Cambodia, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Malaysia, Mozambique, Russia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
60. Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Haiti, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Moldova, and Zambia. Ukraine, which was competitive authoritarian between 1991 and 2004, is scored as an ambiguous case, as the 2004-5 transition was too recent to score it with any confidence.
61. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945-1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994).
62. Geoffrey Pridham, "The European Union's Democratic Conditionality and Domestic Politics in Slovakia: The Meciar and Dzurinda Governments Compared," Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (2002), 206.
63. Geoffrey Pridham, Europe-Asia Studies, Ibid., p. 207.
64. Geoffrey Pridham, "Complying with the European Union's Democratic Conditionality: Transnational Party Linkages and Regime Change in Slovakia, 1993-1998," Europe-Asia Studies, 51 (1999), 1229-30.
65. Karen Henderson, "Slovakia and the Democratic Criteria for EU Accession" in Karen Henderson, ed., Back to Europe: Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union (London: UCL Press, 1999), pp. 221-40.
66. Kevin Deegan-Krause, "Accountability and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic" (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2000).
67. Pridham, "Complying with the European Union's Democratic Conditionality," pp. 1229-30.
68. Frank Schimmelfennig, Stefan Engert, and Heiko Knobel, "The Impact of EU Political Conditionality," in Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, eds., The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe, p. 70.
69. Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 162-72.
70. Jorge I. Domínguez and Rafael Fernández de Castro, The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2001).
71. Abraham F. Lowenthal, Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America in the 1990s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 70.
72. Domínguez and Fernández de Castro, p. 75.
73. Miguel Ángel Centeno, Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 125-26.
74. Denise Dresser, "Treading Lightly and without a Stick: International Actors and the Promotion of Democracy in Mexico," in Tom Farer, ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 329.
75. Bruce M. Bagley and Juan G. Tokatlian, "Dope and Dogma: Explaining the Failure of U.S.-Latin American Drug Policies," in Jonathan Hartlyn, Lars Schoultz, and Augusto Varas, eds., The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 221.
76. Dresser, pp. 320-21.
77. Centeno, p. 240.
78. Dresser, p. 337.
79. Sikkink, p. 432.
80. Ibid., p. 433.
81. Dresser p. 334.
82. Donald E. Schulz and Edward J. Williams, "Crisis or Transformation? The Struggle for the Soul of Mexico," in Donald E. Schulz and Edward J. Williams, eds., Mexico Faces the 21st Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 12.
83. Dresser, p. 332; Todd A. Eisenstadt, "Thinking outside the (Ballot) Box: Mexico's Informal Electoral Institutions," Latin American Politics and Society, 45 (Spring 2003), 25-54.
84. Susan Kaufman Purcell, "The Changing Nature of US-Mexican Relations," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 39 (Spring 1997), 150.
85. Chappell H. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 20.
86. During the early 1990s foreign aid constituted one-third of Zambia's GDP. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67.
87. In 2001 Zambia had six and eight times fewer televisions per capita than in Mexico and Slovakia, respectively, and in 2002 it had twenty and thirty-three times fewer internet users than Mexico and Slovakia. World Bank, World Development Indicators Online.
88. Richard Joseph, "Zambia: A Model for Democratic Change," Current History (May 1992).
89. C. Baylies and M. Szeftel, "The 1996 Zambian Elections: Still Awaiting Democratic Consolidation," Review of African Political Economy, 24 (1997), 113-28.
90. Lise Rakner, Political and Economic Liberalization in Zambia 1991-2001 (Stockholm: Nordic Africa Institute, 2003), pp. 115-16.
91. Lise Rakner, Political and Economic Liberalization in Zambia 1991-2001 Ibid., pp. 150, 153, 162.
92. A Lexis Nexis search found that between 1990 and 2000 the number of New York Times and CNN stories on the Mexican Zapatista movement was eight times greater than the number of stories on any topic in Zambia.
93. Africa Confidential, June 21, 1996.
94. Strobe Talbott, Russia Hand (New York: Knopf, 2002).
95. An estimated 80 percent of U.S. assistance to Russia during the 1990s was security-related, whereas 2.3 percent of USAID funding was aimed at the promotion of democracy. James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy towards Russia after the Cold War (Washington, DC.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), pp. 110, 114.
96. In 2002 there were forty-one internet users in Russia per 1,000 population, compared to ninety-eight in Mexico and 160 in Slovakia. World Bank, World Development Indicators Online.
97. Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov, eds., Politicheskii Almanakh Rossii (Moscow: Moscow Carnegie Centre, 1998);
98. Michael McFaul, Russia's 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1997).
99. Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia (New York: Belka Publications, 1994), p. 135.
100. Svante E. Cornell, "International Reactions to Massive Human Rights Violations: The Case of Chechnya," Europe-Asia Studies, 51 (January 1999), 85-100.
101. Goldgeier and McFaul, ch. 11.
102. See Whitehead, pp. 3, 9; Bratton and van de Walle, p. 30.
103. Diamond, Developing Democracy;
104. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts" World Politics, 49 (January 1997), 155-83.