Political competition and democratic stability in new democracies

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 221-245

  Wright, Joseph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48849087632     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000124     Document Type: Article

References (96)

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3. Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi and Adam Przeworski, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
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5. Robert Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen, David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran, 'Democratic Transitions,' American Journal of Political Science, 50 (2006) 551-69;
6. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 'Endogenous Democratization', World Politics, 55 (2003), 517-49;
7. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development; Przeworski and Limongi, 'Modernization'.
8. Their sample stretches back to 1800, thus including more new democracies than the data published by Alvarez et al. in 2000. Boix and Stokes count thirty-two new democracies before 1946 and one incumbent democracy (United States), so this sample captures the democracies when they were 'new' that were included as relatively wealthy incumbent democracies in the Alvarez sample. In this pre-war sample of new democracies, sixteen of the twenty-nine for which we have data on per capita income failed and thirteen survived (per capita income data are from Angus Maddison, 'Historical Statistics for the World Economy: 1-2003 AD', available at http://www.ggdc.net/maddison, and I count European democracies such as Denmark and Norway, which were occupied by Germany during the Second World War, as having survived). Given the small sample size and the lack of data on useful controls, I conduct a t-test for the difference of means between democracies that failed and survived for Log(GDP) and initial level of Political Competition. Though the mean income for new democracies that failed (7.62) is less than the mean income for those that survived (7.77), the difference is not statistically significant. The mean level of initial political competition for those that failed (2.79) is also lower than the mean for those that survived (3.54), and this difference is significant at the 0.10 level. While this test is by no means conclusive, it suggests that even during the first wave of democratization, the level of initial political competition mattered: new democracies with higher levels of political competition were less likely to fail, whereas income does not appear to vary significantly with the failure outcome.
9. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).
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14. Samuel Valenzuela, 'Democratic Consolidation in Post-transitional Settings: The Military in Latin America', in Scott Mainwaring et al., eds, Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1992), pp. 57-104;
15. Guillermo O'Donnell and Phillipe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
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21. Dahl, Polyarchy.
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25. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, chap. 1.
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30. This model does not attempt to explain the variation in the duration of new democracies directly, and this therefore is not the subject of the empirical tests in this article.
31. Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University, 1993).
32. Wendy Hunter, Eroding Military Influence in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
33. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942).
34. William Barnes, 'Incomplete Democracy in Central America: Polarization and Voter Turnout in Nicaragua and El Salvador', Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, 40, No. 3 (1998), 63-101.
35. I use the year of transition (and not the year of the first contested election) so as not to exclude cases where the first contested elections took up to twelve months to organize and carry out.
36. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development.
37. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development; José Antonio Cheibub and Jennifer Gandhi. 'Classifying Political Regimes' (unpublished paper, Yale University, 2003).
38. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
39. Appendix B lists the new democratic regimes included in this study. Some regimes are not used in the empirical analysis due to missing data (e.g. Panama 1949).
40. The five categories are: repressed, suppressed, factional, transitional and competitive. They indicate, respectively: repressed, '[n]o significant oppositional activity is permitted outside the ranks of the regime and ruling party'; suppressed '[s]ome organized, political competition occurs outside government, without serious factionalism; but the regime systematically and sharply limits its form, extent, or both in ways that exclude substantial groups from participation'; factional '[p]olities with parochial or ethnic-based political factions that regularly compete for political influence in order to promote particularist agendas and favor group members to the detriment of common, secular, or cross-cutting agendas'; transitional, 'transitional arrangements are accommodative of competing, parochial interests but have not fully linked parochial with broader, general interests - where sectarian and secular interest groups coexist'; competitive regimes '[t]here are relatively stable and enduring, secular political groups which regularly compete for political influence at the national level; ruling groups and coalitions regularly, voluntarily transfer central power to competing groups'. It is important to note that this measure does not rely on and is not correlated with measures of formal political institutions such as parlimentarism/ presidentialism, district magnitude or electoral rules.
41. Democracies that transitioned from former colonies and have survived (to date) typically have higher levels of initial political competition - India (4), Mauritius (4), and Trinidad (3) - than those former colonial new democracies that did not survive - Congo Brazzaville (3), Nigeria (3), Pakistan (3), Sierra Leone (3), Somalia (0), and Sri Lanka (0).
42. Karl Deutsch, 'Social Mobilization and Political Development', American Political Science Review, 55 (1961), 493-514;
43. Seymour Lipset, 'Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy', American Political Science Review, 53 (1959), 69-105;
44. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Macmillan, 1958).
45. Ross Burkhart and Michael Lewis-Beck, 'Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis', American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 903-10;
46. Kenneth Bollen and Robert Jackson, 'Political Democracy and size distribution of income', American Sociological Review, 50 (1985), 438-57.
47. Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
48. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development; Przeworski and Limongi, 'Modernization'.
49. A list of variables and data sources is in Appendix C.
50. O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism.
51. Juan Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1978);
52. Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufmann, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
53. Gasioworski, 'Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change'.
54. John Londregan and Keith T. Poole, 'Poverty, the Coup Trap, and the Seizure of Executive Power', World Politics, 42 (1990), 151-83.
55. Linz, 'Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy';
56. Valenzuela, 'Democratic Consolidation in Posttransitional Settings';
57. Donald Horowitz, 'Democracy in Divided Societies', Journal of Democracy, 4, No. 4 (1993), 18-38;.
58. Donald Horowitz, 'Comparing Democratic Systems', Journal of Democracy, 1, No. 4 (1990), 73-9;
59. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
60. Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946-1962 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1999);
61. Mark Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991);
62. James S. Coleman Bender, Gerald and Richard L. Sklar, African Crisis Areas and U.S. Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
63. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes; O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism;
64. Nancy Bermeo, 'Myths of Moderation: Confrontation and Conflict During Democratic Transitions', Comparative Politics, 29, No. 3 (1993), 305-22;
65. Wendy Hunter, Eroding Military Influence in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
66. Bratton and Van deWalle, Democratic Experiments in Africa.
67. Huntington, Third Wave of Democracy; Bratton and van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa;
68. Geddes, 'The Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes';
69. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development.
70. A. Mintz. 'Guns Versus Butter: A Disaggregated Analysis', American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1285-93;
71. B. Russet, 'Defense Expenditures and National Well-being', American Political Science Review, 76 (1982), 767-77.
72. Nils Tetter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg and Havard Strand, 'Armed Conflict 1946-2001: A New Dataset', Journal of Peace Research, 39 (2002), 615-37.
73. This is also the dependent variable used in Table 3.
74. William Easterly and Ross Levine. 'Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 (1997), 1203-50;
75. Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat and Romain Wacziarg, 'Fractionalization', Journal of Economic Growth, 8 (2003), 155-94.
76. Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny, 'The Quality of Government', Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 15 (1999), 222-79.
77. Daniel Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
78. Kanchan Chandra, 'Ethnic Parties and Democratic Stability', Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2005), 235-52.
79. Chua, World On Fire.
80. Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan Katz and Richard Tuck, 'Taking Time Seriously: Time-series-cross-section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable', American Journal of Political Science, 89 (1998), 634-47.
81. Results from parametric duration models using the Weibull distribution are available from the author. The main results presented below do not change using the Weibull models.
82. Substantively, this tells us that in the sample of new democracies, it is extremely difficult to overthrow a long-lived democratic regime.
83. Including early period splines instead of time and exponential transformations in the model does not alter the results.
84. Gary King and Langche Zeng, 'Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data', Political Analysis, 9 (2001), 137-63.
85. The main results reported below do not change if I employ unclustered standard errors or use uncorrected logit estimates. In fact, the coefficients for the main results are much larger when I use unclustered standard error estimates and uncorrected logit estimates. That is, clustering the standard errors and using rare events logit increases the size of the standard errors and decreases the size of the logit coefficients, making conventional statistical significance more difficult to obtain.
86. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development;
87. Boix and Stokes, 'Endogenous Democratization'.
88. To explore the time dependence in the model further I re-ran each of the models using a parametric duration model with a Weibull distribution. These tests confirm the existence of time dependence in the data. I estimate a time dependence parameter, ln (p), for all the models and tested for ln (p) = 0, which is the same as testing whether or not p differs from 1. If p < 1 and significantly different from 1, then we would have evidence of democratic consolidation: democracies would be less likely to fail the longer they live, all else equal. The tests indicate that ln (p) = 0 and hence p = 1. In fact I find p > 1 in all the estimates, suggesting that a process quite the opposite of consolidation takes place. Beck et al., 'Taking Time Seriously', make the point that the p estimate in these duration models is simply an error term that should be included to control for time dependence but that should not be interpreted substantively.
89. Alvarez et al., Democracy and Development, by contrast, make explicit substantive interpretations of the p estimates. They find that once they control for level of economic development, the baseline hazard rate estimates (p) are not significantly different from one, concluding essentially that democratic termination is time invariant and that democratic consolidation does not occur. Suffice it to say here that the results support Przeworski's contention that democratic consolidation probably does not occur, though the results do not support the finding that democratic duration is time-invariant.
90. Because we cannot directly interpret logit coefficients, these simulations give a sense of the substantive significance of the coefficients. For these simulated predicted probabilities, I set all continuous variables at their mean. The Africa dummy is set to 0; the authoritarian regime type is military; the democratic regime type is presidential; the Cold War is set to 0; and minor and intermediate conflict levels are set to 0.
91. At first glance, it might appear that these results are endogenous, as five of the eight new democracies in the sample that met with war did so in their first year. This suggests the possibility that it may be war that is causing the low level of initial political competition and not the other way around. However, when I re-run the model with those five cases dropped from the sample, the finding remains strong.
92. Oil production data are measured as lagged per capita oil production, taken from Macartan Humphreys, 'Natural Resource, Conflict, and Conflict Resolution', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49 (2005), 508-37.
93. Nicolas Van de Walle, 'Presidentialism and Clientalism in Africa's Emerging Demcracies', Journal of Modern African Studies, 41 (2003), 297-321.
94. I repeat this exercise (analysis not shown) for Delta, but here the results indicate that the level of development is not a good predictor of the difference between the level of political competition in the last year of the antecedent authoritarian regime and the first year of the new democracy. Rather, former authoritarian regime type, a Europe dummy, previously having been a democracy, and ethnic fractionalization are all associated with Delta. The significant Europe and previous democracy coefficients are due to the fact that Germany and Italy liberalized very quickly after the Second World War and Portugal and Spain did so very quickly in the 1970s.
95. Gary King and Langche Zeng, 'Explaining Rare Events in International Relations', International Organization, 55 (2001), 693-715.
96. L), but makes little intuitive sense as it would require that the challenger fight when political competition is high.