The threat to young democracies

Survival

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 127-140

  Converse, Nathan ^a   Kapstein, Ethan B ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 49949089793     PISSN: 00396338     EISSN: 14682699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00396330802034325     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Freedom House, 'Freedom in the World 2007: Year Marked by Global "Freedom Stagnation", Setbacks for Democracy in Asia', press release, 7 January 2007, http://www.freedomhouse.org/ template.cfm?page=70&release=457.
2. We define young democracies as states that have adopted democratic forms of government at some point since 1960. Our definitions of democracy and of political regime change (i.e. reversal) are based on Polity IV rankings; see http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/polity.
3. For more on our data base and on case selection, see Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse, The Fate of Young Democracies (forthcoming). Our data base has been posted at http://www.cgdev.org and at http://www.ethankapstein.com.
4. These points are elaborated in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)
5. and Philip Keefer, Democracy and Clientelism: Why are Young Democracies Badly Governed?, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3594 (Washington DC: World Bank, 2005).
6. While this article presents only descriptive statistics we do present the results of our multivariate regressions using event-history models in Kapstein and Converse, The Fate of Young Democracies.
7. Thailand's recent reversal is not included in our data set, which ends in 2003.
8. See Barry Eichengreen and David Leblang, Democracy and Globalization National Bureau of Economic Reform Working Paper 12540 (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 2006), available at https://ncgg.princeton.edu/IPES/2006/papers/ leblang_eichengreen_S230_2.pdf.
9. There is also a growing literature on the 'natural resources curse' with respect to democracy. See for example Michael Ross, 'Does Oil Hinder Democracy?', World Politics, vol. 53, no. 3, April 2001, pp. 325-61.
10. For a notable example, see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11. Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
12. Alberto Alesina et al., 'Fractionalization', Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 8, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 155-94.
13. See Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
14. A notable example is Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15. See Rajiv Chandresakaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (New York: Vintage, 2007).
16. Michael Bernhard, Christopher Reenock and Timothy Nordstrom, 'Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival', Journal of Politics, vol. 63, no. 3, August 2003, pp. 775-803.
17. We again make use of the Polity IV data set, specifically, Polity's 'executive constraints' or 'exconst' variable.
18. In our regression analysis we find that a positive change in the executive- constraints variables (meaning stronger constraints) reduced by some 20% the baseline likelihood of democratic reversal in a given polity.