Long time coming

International Security

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 115-148

  Moon, Bruce E ^a  

^a LEHIGH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70450164368     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2009.33.4.115     Document Type: Article

References (179)

1. Jarrett Murphy, "Text of Bush Speech," http:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/01/iraq/main551946.shtml.
2. George W. Bush, "President Discusses Freedom in Iraq and Middle East," remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html.
3. David Stout, " RumsfeldWarns Iraq's Neighbors against Aiding Zarqawi," New York Times, June 1, 2005.
4. Opinions range from Anthony Cordesman-"The notion that Iraq will suddenly emerge as a stable democracy and will change the rest of the Arab world crosses the line between neoconservative and neo-crazy" -to Colin L. Powell's: " We reject the condescending notion that freedom will not grow in the Middle East or that there is any region of the world that cannot support democracy." See Cordesman, quoted in USA Today, November 11, 2002.
5. Powell, "The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative: Building Hope for the Years Ahead," Heritage Lecture, No. 772 (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, December 12, 2002).
6. As Samuel P. Huntington put it, "The problem is not to hold elections but to create organizations."
7. See Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968). For a demonstration that individual-level expressions of support for democracy are only weakly linked with societal-level democracy, see Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, "Political Culture and Democracy: Analyzing Cross-Level Linkages," Comparative Politics, Vol. 36, No. 1 (October 2003), pp. 61-79.
8. These would include security problems, ethnic conflicts, regional complications, cultural predilections, and external involvement. A good example of an ideographic approach is Daniel Heradstveit and Helge Hveem, eds., Oil in the Gulf: Obstacles to Democracy and Development (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005).
9. Blueprints for the design of a democratic system include Adeed I. Dawisha and Karen Dawisha, "How to Build a Democratic Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 3 (May/June 2003), pp. 36-50.
10. Chappell Lawson, " How Best to Build Democracy: Laying a Foundation for the New Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 4 (July/August 2003), pp. 206-207.
11. No set of past cases can definitively predict the future of a current one, because there are always unique attributes that make the parallels imperfect. Rather than beginning with this " impossibility theorem,"however, I address the objections to generalization in a later section.
12. The term " third wave"was introduced in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), to refer to the de mocratization of about thirty countries between 1974 and 1990. Here, as elsewhere, the term is expanded to encompass the period since 1990 as well, during which it has been suggested that democratization is easier than it had been earlier. For the most cogent argument that the post-Soviet experience should not be grouped with the earlier transitions, see Michael McFaul, "The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World," World Politics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (January 2002), pp. 212-244.
13. See Kristian S. Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, "Double Take: A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Politics," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 41, No. 3 (June 1997), pp. 361-383.
14. John O'Loughlin, Michael D. Ward, Corey L. Lofdahl, Jordin S. Cohen, David S. Brown, David Reilly, Kristian S. Gleditsch, and Michael Shin, "The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 88, No. 4 (December 1998), pp. 545-574.
15. Yi Feng and Paul J. Zak, "The Determinants of Democratic Transitions," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 43, No. 2 (April 1999), pp. 162-177.
16. James R. Scarritt, Susan M. McMillan, and Shaheen Mozaffar, "The Interaction between Democracy and Ethnopolitical Protest and Rebellion in Africa," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 34, No. 7 (September 2001), pp. 800-827.
17. Bruce E. Moon, Jennifer Harvey Birdsall, Sylvia Ceisluk, Lauren M. Garlett, Joshua J. Hermias, Elizabeth Mendenhall, Patrick D. Schmid, and Wai Hong Wong, "Voting Counts: Participation in the Measurement of Democracy," Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 3-32.
18. Joe Foweraker and Todd Landman, "Economic Development and Democracy Revisited: Why Dependency Theory Is Not Yet Dead," Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 1-20.
19. Hysteresis is used especially to denote systems that do not return completely to their original state after a disturbance has been removed. For instance, if you push on a piece of putty it will assume a new shape, but when you remove your hand it will not return to its original shape entirely or quickly. Political systems are similar: Saddam Hussein's hand will affect the shape of Iraqi governance long after his direct influence has ended.
20. For example, Ibrahim El Badawi and Samir Makdisi find that nations close the gap between their actual level of democracy and the level expected on the basis of their current structural conditions at a rate of 4 to 5 percent per year.
21. See El Badawi and Makdisi, "Explaining the Democracy Deficit in the Arab World," Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Vol. 46, No. 5 (February 2007), pp. 813-831.
22. Robert J. Barro similarly estimates that 25 percent of the adjustment occurs over five years and almost 70 percent over twenty years.
23. See Barro, "Determinants of Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, No. 6, pt. 2 (December 1999), pp. S158-S183.
24. See Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy," American Political Science Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (March 1959), pp. 69-105.
25. Seymour Martin Lipset, "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited: 1993 Presidential Address," American Sociological Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (February 1994), pp. 1-22.
26. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 1966).
27. Kenneth A. Bollen, "World System Position, Dependency, and Democracy: The Cross-National Evidence," American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 4 (August 1983), pp. 468-479.
28. Ronald Inglehart, "The Renaissance of Political Culture," American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 4 (December 1988), pp. 1203-1230.
29. Ross E. Burkhart and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, "Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis," American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 (December 1994), pp. 903-910.
30. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
31. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts," World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2 (January 1997), pp. 155-183.
32. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
33. Renske Doorenspleet, "The Structural Context of Recent Transitions to Democracy," European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 43, No. 3 (May 2004), pp. 309-335.
34. See, for example, Herbert Kitschelt, "Political Regime Change: Structure and Process-driven Explanations?" American Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 4 (December 1992), pp. 1028-1034.
35. Guillermo O'Donnell and Phillipe C. Schmitter, "Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies," in O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
36. See Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
37. Thomas Carothers, "The End of the Transition Paradigm," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 5-21.
38. Mark J. Gasiorowski and Timothy J. Power, "The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation: Evidence from the Third World," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 31, No. 6 (December 1998), p. 740.
39. This is also where most transitions break down: the authors report that nearly a third of third world democracies collapse before the first (postfounding) election, about half before the first change in power has been effected, and more than 60 percent within twelve years.
40. See Timothy J. Power and Mark J. Gasiorowski, "Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 123-155.
41. For the determinants of democratic collapse.
42. see Jon C. Pevehouse, "With a Little Help from My Friends? Regional Organizations and the Consolidation of Democracy," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 46, No. 3 (July 2002), pp. 611-626.
43. Abraham Diskin, Hanna Diskin, and Reuven Y. Hazan, "Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success," International Political Science Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (July 2005), pp. 291-309.
44. Athird theoretical approach to democratization, which emphasizes diffusion, is more ambiguous as to speed but selective in the circumstances under which democracy is likely.
45. See Harvey Starr, "Democratic Dominoes: Diffusion Approaches to the Spread of Democracy in the International System," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 35, No. 2 (June 1991), pp. 356-381.
46. Harvey Starr and Christina Lindborg, "Democratic Dominoes Revisited: The Hazards of Governmental Transitions, 1974-1996," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 47, No. 4 (August 2003), pp. 490-519.
47. O'Loughlin et al., "The Diffusion of Democracy".
48. Kristian S. Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, "War and Peace in Space and Time: The Role of Democratization," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (March 2000), pp. 1-29.
49. For example, during the most rapid phase of democratization, a nation may be expected to close nearly a quarter of the gap between its own level of democracy and that of its neighbors each year.
50. See, for example, Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, "Diffusion Is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4 (May 2006), pp. 463-489.
51. The undemocratic "neighborhood" surrounding Iraq, however, precludes democratization through the diffusion channel. Another literature finds that short-term economic downturns destabilize all governments, but do not necessarily bring democracy.
52. See, for example, Mark J. Gasiorowski, "Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis," American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (December 1995), pp. 882-897.
53. Michael Bernhard, Christopher Reenock, and Timothy Nordstram, "The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 223-250.
54. See Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, "Toward Consolidated Democracies," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 14-33.
55. The manifest inability of the Iraqi state to exercise control belies the claim that Iraq should be considered democratic because elections have been successfully conducted. Until the state is providing all the services and functions expected of government, with the modest aid of outside forces, no assessment of a system's level of democracy can be meaningful. By definition, a democratic government must actually be governing. In practice, the gravest threats to democracy occur when the state attempts to balance these governance challenges with the constraints imposed by the democratic principles discussed below. For example, it is relatively easy to provide security or to respect civil liberties, but devilishly difficult to do both at the same time.
56. See John Waterbury, "Fortuitous Byproducts," in Lisa Anderson, ed., Transitions to Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 261-283.
57. See Larry Diamond, "Toward Democratic Consolidation," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 3 (July 1994), pp. 4-17.
58. The Polity data set is introduced in Keith Jaggers and Ted Robert Gurr, "Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 4 (November 1995), pp. 469-482.
59. It is widely regarded as the most reliable and valid of the available data sets, and it offers the greatest coverage, encompassing nearly 200 countries for each year between 1800 and 2007.
60. See Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, "Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 3-34.
61. Moon et al., "Voting Counts." Polity's conception of democracy is unusually well documented via the writings of its founders, its exemplary codebook, and other materials, which include Ted Robert Gurr, " Persistence and Change in Political Systems, 1800-1971," American Political Science Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (December 1974), pp. 1482-1504.
62. Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2006, Dataset Users' Manual, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm, which is also the source of the data used throughout this article. There are, of course, many data sets on democracy, each utilizing its own definitions, but all agree that Iraq belongs in the most autocratic category.
63. See, for example, Mike Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworski, "Classifying Political Regimes," Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 3-36.
64. Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang H. Reinicke, "Measuring Polyarchy," in Alex Inkeles, ed., On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991), pp. 47-68.
65. Mark J. Gasiorowski, "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (August 1996), pp. 469-483.
66. Moon et al., "Voting Counts".
67. Tatu Vanhanen, "A New Dataset for Measuring Democracy, 1810-1998," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 2 (March 2000), pp. 251-265; and the data sets on autocracy cited above.
68. Harry Eckstein and Ted Robert Gurr, Patterns of Authority: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry (New York: Wiley, 1975).
69. For coding details, see an earlier version of this article, "Can Iraq Democratize? How Long Will It Take?" paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, March 1-5, 2005. To demonstrate that the conclusions do not rest on any idiosyncrasies in the Polity data, it is augmented whenever possible with Freedom House's ratings, which are available only since 1972 (see http://www.freedomhouse.org). The Freedom House conception of "freedom" is more eclectic than Polity's emphasis on democratic institutions and empirically more sensitive to civil liberties. Yet, the two theoretically different data sets are in close empirical agreement-83 percent of the variance in one is shared by the other-as shown in Moon et al., "Voting Counts.".
70. Jaggers and Gurr, "Tracking Democracy's ThirdWave with the Polity III Data," p. 474 n. 12.
71. For a further discussion of coherent and incoherent polities, see Gurr, "Persistence and Change in Political Systems".
72. Robert Harmel, "Gurr's 'Persistence and Change' Revisited: Some Consequences of Using Different Operationalizations of 'Change of Polity,'" European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 1980), pp. 189-214
73. Mark Irving Lichbach, Regime Change and the Coherence of European Governments (Denver: University of Denver, 1984); and Jaggers and Gurr, "Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data.".
74. The +/-7 standard was originally defined by Polity and has been used frequently in studies examining various consequences of democracy relevant to declared U.S. interests, especially in the "democratic peace" literature.
75. See David L. Rousseau, Christopher Gelpi, Dan Reiter, and Paul K. Huth, "Assessing the Dyadic Nature of the Democratic Peace, 1918-88," American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (September 1996), pp. 512-533.
76. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, "Democratic Transitions, Institutional Strength, and War," International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 297-337.
77. Jonathan W. Keller, "Leadership Style, Regime Type, and Foreign Policy Crisis Behavior: A Contingent Monadic Peace?" International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 205-232.
78. Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell, "Authoritarian Regimes: Stability, Change, and Pathways to Democracy, 1972-2003," Working Paper, No. 331 (South Bend, Ind.: Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, November 2006).
79. Although the most recent Polity codebook proposes a cutoff at +/-6, as will become clear, lowering the bar from +7 to +6, +5, or even +4 affects few cases. Other plausible cutoff points would incline the analysis toward greater pessimism. Robert A. Dahl argues that +8 is more appropriate.
80. See Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980).
81. Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong find that human rights are much better upheld at +8 and above.
82. See Davenport and Armstrong, "Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 538-554.
83. The most authoritative study on the diffusion of democracy-a key issue for the Bush initiative to spread democracy in the Middle East-also uses +8.
84. See O'Loughlin et al., "The Diffusion of Democracy." Brian Lai and Dan Slater use +6, but report that their results would be no different at either +5 or +7. Lai and Slater, "Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950-1992," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2006), pp. 113-126.
85. For an elaborate exposition of Polity's coding of these cases and a comparison with the far more common profile of autocracies rated -7, see Moon, "Can Iraq Democratize?" In 2007 the best known members of this latter group of eleven (plus four rated -8) are China, Cuba, Kuwait, and Syria. The most notable historical cases include the Soviet Union between Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev, almost all of the Eastern European states during the Cold War era, and Afghanistan for the majority of the last forty years. Other recent efforts to distinguish among authoritarian regimes also place these states in the most autocratic category. Hadenius and Teorell recognize five major types of autocracy, five minor types, and six hybrids, largely on the basis of "modes of power maintenance" that correspond roughly to Polity's "executive selection" criteria. They identify Iraq as an amalgam of a military and a one-party state, a category that manifests the highest level of autocracy among any of those sixteen categories.
86. Hadenius and Teorell, "Authoritarian Regimes".
87. Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell, "pathways from Authoritarianism," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 18, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 143-157.
88. The "extreme autocracies" discussed in this article are scattered among their "monarchies," "military regimes," and " one-party states,"all of which exhibit very low democracy scores. Larry Diamond codes all nations for 2001 and includes all of my "extreme autocracies" except Uzbekistan as "politically closed authoritarian regimes," a category of the most autocratic nations distinguished from electoral authoritarian regimes by the absence of multiparty electoral competition and "pluralism".
89. See Diamond, "Thinking about Hybrid Regimes," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (April 2002), pp. 21-35.
90. Barbara Geddes distinguishes a subset of "personalist" regimes such as Saddam's Iraq from other military and single-party regimes and expects them to have greater difficulty in democratising.
91. See Geddes, "What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?" Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2 (June 1999), pp. 115-144.
92. O'Donnell and Schmitter, "Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies," p. 19.
93. Geddes finds that personalist regimes hardly ever survive the death of the founder because the most able successors will have been eliminated as potential rivals-certainly the pattern formed by Saddam Hussein's many purges, which began almost immediately upon his seizure of power. The violence that usually surrounds the collapse dooms democratic prospects. She writes, "Democracies are created by negotiation. It is very rare for them to emerge directly from popular insurgency, rebellion, or civil war".
94. See Geddes, "What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?" p. 132.
95. Valerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik, "Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 17, No. 4 (October 2006), p. 6.
96. Ibid., p. 8.
97. Ibid., p. 15.
98. See Barbara Geddes, "Challenging the Conventional Wisdom," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 5, No. 4 (October 1994), pp. 104-118.
99. Yitzhak Nakash, "The Shi'ites and the Future of Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 4 (July/ August 2003), pp. 17-26.
100. Islam in Iraq is an intriguing parallel as an institution of civil society, but it does not provide the same unifying nationalism in ethnically fractionalized Iraq that the Catholic Church represented in Poland. Sharp divisions between competing Islamic traditions in Iraq have been exploited by autocrats to prevent challenges going back to Ottoman times, and most studies still expect Islam to retard rather than advance democracy.
101. The sample includes only cases since the beginning of the twentieth century.
102. Similarly, Geddes finds that personalist regimes such as Iraq's are less than half as likely to transit to stable democracy as military regimes. See Geddes, "What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?" Hadenius and Teorell confirm that result and also find that military and one-party states (Iraq being a hybrid of the two) are much less likely to become democratic than other authoritarian regimes. See Hadenius and Teorell, "Pathways from Authoritarianism.".
103. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
104. The shorter estimate is found in Gasiorowski and Power, "The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation"; and the longer estimate is in Scott Mainwaring, "Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (July 1993), pp. 198-228.
105. Phebe Marr identifies ninety-seven leaders in three governments: the Iraq Governing Council and the Council of Ministers appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, the interim government selected after the transfer of sovereignty in 2004, and the government elected in early 2005. She finds that of Iraq's post-Saddam leaders only 27 percent were known to be living under Saddam's regime in 2003, whereas 38 percent were known to be abroad (another 19 percent were living in the northern Kurdish "free" zone, and 16 percent are of unknown background). Most Iraqis who have held office since the 1970s have been banned from public service. See Phebe Marr, " Who Are Iraq's New Leaders? What Do They Want?" Special Report, No. 160 (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, March 2006), pp. 5-8.
106. Feng and Zak, "The Determinants of Democratic Transitions.".
107. Several dates might be cited for Iraq's birth as an independent polity. The British seized military control of Basra in 1914, Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in 1918. Iraq was entrusted to a British mandate by the League of Nations as a separate territory in 1919. After a 1920 revolt, Britain installed Faisal, a non-Iraqi, as monarch in 1921. An elected constituent assembly first met in 1924 and declared Iraqi sovereignty, but the British high commission retained de facto power until the British recognized Iraqi sovereignty in 1932 and Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations. Iraqi nationals usually cite 1921, but Polity uses the 1924 date.
108. Phebe Marr observes, however, that it was during the Islamization of this area, then under Persian control, in the early seventh century that " Iraq acquired a reputation that it retains today of a country difficult to govern." Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2004), p. 5.
109. Ottoman rule was only the most recent incarnation of an age-old history of control by various foreign powers, which at various times also included Greeks, Romans, Mongols, and Turkmen, as well as caliphs centered from Medina and Damascus to central Asia, frequently supported by foreign mercenaries.
110. Ibid., p. 177.
111. Ibid., p. 178.
112. Marr, "Who Are Iraq's New Leaders?" p. 7.
113. It also reveals the radically different histories of the post-World War II cases of democratization, which are sometimes erroneously cited as precedents for Iraq. For examples of this inaccuracy.
114. see Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, "Democracy in Iraq?" Washington Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Summer 2003), pp. 119-136.
115. James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel M. Swanger, and Anga Timilsina, America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2003).
116. Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. ArmyWar College, 2003).
117. Germany's extreme autocracy was brief (1933-44) and was preceded for a longer period (1919-32) by the Weimar Republic (+6). From 1890 to 1919, it was scored +1 or +2. Italy had no democratic tradition, but its extreme autocracy (-9) was also relatively brief (1928-42) and was preceded by two decades of -1. Japan's last coherent autocracy ended in 1857, after which it was coded as more democratic than autocratic (+1) for more than seventy-five years before 1945. These nations also had far greater prospects in terms of democratic requisites, as discussed in Eva Bellin, "The Iraqi Intervention and Democracy in Comparative Historical Perspective," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 119, No. 4 (Winter 2004-05), pp. 595-608.
118. This list excludes countries that have ceased to exist as independent entities, such as East Germany. It includes nations whose established extreme autocracy began before the twentieth century, but extended into it, such as Russia.
119. Both the Polity and Freedom House data are available only through 2007.
120. Observe also that "from 1972 to 2003, 77% of transitions from authoritarian government resulted in another authoritarian regime." Hadenius and Teorell, "Pathways from Authoritarianism," p. 152.
121. All but Ivory Coast (coded "transitional" since 2002) are " incoherent polities" between +6 and -6. Afghanistan, which fell just a year shy of qualifying as an established extreme autocracy with its -10 from 1945 to 1963, would otherwise belong here as well. It has been assigned the "foreign interruption" code since the Taliban regime (-7) ended in 2001; Freedom House has rated it equivalent to -3 since 2005.
122. Freedom House uses two 1-7 indexes for political rights and civil liberties, in which the lower numbers are more democratic. To avoid confusion in table 3 and achieve comparability with Polity, their indexes are mapped to Polity's -10 to +10 scale using the formula 14.32 - (1.70 x (FHpol + FHciv)) and rounding downward. That formula reflects a regression that accounted for 82 percent of the variance over the 4,823 cases for which data exist on both.
123. In fact, Freedom House data show that, as of 2007, twelve of the fifteen have retreated from their most democratic rating since emerging from extreme autocracy.
124. Since the 1980s the incidence of electoral autocracies has grown substantially more rapidly than the frequency of electoral democracies, according to Hadenius and Teorell, "Pathways from Authoritarianism." The growth of these intermediate political forms, called "incoherent polities"by the Polity project, has been recognized by many others, including Thomas Carothers, who calls them "hybrid regimes," and Fareed Zakaria, who dubs them "illiberal democracies".
125. See Carothers, "The End of the Transition Paradigm".
126. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
127. Malawi, which has bounced between +4 and +6 since 2000, was also once rated (tentatively) as democratic. In earlier Polity versions, it reached +7 from 1994 to 2000, but the 2004 update revised those codes to an incoherent +6.
128. This does not include several European countries whose democracy was interrupted byWorld War II occupation.
129. See Gasiorowski and Power, "The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation." They note that only 37 percent of new democracies survived twelve years, but, among those that did, 69 percent survived another ten years and 62 percent another twenty.
130. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development. They deny, however, that the passage of time helps a democracy "consolidate," arguing that the likelihood of collapse does not decline with age, but only with increasing development.
131. Of course, even current democracies that suffer a future relapse to autocracy or incoherence may eventually become established democracies. But if they do not complete the process before another decline occurs, they will lie beyond a horizon of twenty years, which seems a reasonable approximation of "the foreseeable future."
132. Bulgaria took seventy-three years from its last established extreme autocracy in 1917, but also reverted to extreme autocracy from 1935 to 1942. Guatemala took seventy-six years from 1920, but also experienced extreme autocracy from 1932 to 1943. A third country, Iran (from table 3), also reentered an established extreme autocracy from 1955 to 1978 after exiting an established extreme autocracy in 1905. A fourth, Russia, missed a second period of established extreme autocracy by only a few months.
133. Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy.".
134. See Ross E. Burkhart and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, "Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis," American Political Science Review, Vol. 88, No. 4 (December 1994), pp. 903-910.
135. Edward N. Muller, "Democracy, Economic Development, and Income Inequality," American Sociological Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (February 1988), pp. 50-68.
136. Larry Diamond, "Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered," American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 35, Nos. 4/5 (March/June 1992), pp. 450-499.
137. Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy; and Doorenspleet, "The Structural Context of Recent Transitions to Democracy.".
138. See Michael L. Ross, "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?" World Politics, Vol. 53, No. 3 (April 2001), pp. 325-361.
139. See Harvey Starr and Christina Lindborg, "Democratic Dominoes Revisited: The Hazards of Governmental Transitions, 1974-1996," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 47, No. 4 (August 2003), pp. 490-519
140. O'Loughlin et al., "The Diffusion of Democracy".
141. Barbara Wejnert, "Diffusion, Development, and Democracy, 1800-1999," American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (February 2005), pp. 53-81.
142. Christian Welzel, Ronald Inglehart, and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, "The Theory of Human Development: A Cross-Cultural Analysis," European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 42, No. 3 (May 2003), pp. 341-379.
143. Examples of this frequent finding include Bernard Lewis, "A Historical Overview," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 52-63.
144. Feng and Zak, "The Determinants of Democratic Transitions." For a dissenting argument.
145. see Alfred C. Stepan with Graeme B. Robertson, "An 'Arab' More Than a 'Muslim' Electoral Gap," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 2003), pp. 30-44.
146. Of course, either formulation predicts lower democracy in Iraq. Religion is found to be not statistically significant in equations that also include an Arab dummy and an oil production variable in El Badawi and Makdisi, "Explaining the Democracy Deficit in the Arab World."
147. Seymour Martin Lipset, Kyoung-Ryung Seong, and John Charles Torres, "A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy," International Social Science Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May 1993), pp. 155-176.
148. Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstram, "The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival.".
149. See Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat, and Romain Wacziarg, "Fractionalization," Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2003), pp. 155-194.
150. Bollen, "World System Position, Dependency and Democracy"
151. Ronan Van Rossem, "The World System Paradigm as General Theory of Development: A Cross-National Test," American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 3 (June 1996), pp. 508-527.
152. Michael Colaresi andWilliam R. Thompson, "The Economic Development-Democratization Relationship: Does the Outside World Matter?" Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (May 2003), pp. 381-403.
153. More narrow factors include the tendency of presidential systems to fail more often than parliamentary ones, as shown in Diskin, Diskin, and Hazan, " Why Democracies Collapse." For the observation that both democracies and autocracies are more stable during periods of economic growth.
154. see Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, "What Makes Democracies Endure?" Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 1 (January 1996), pp. 39-55, and Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development.
155. An apt comparison can be made with Barro, "Determinants of Democracy," which projects democracy in 1995 on the basis of a regression that uses Freedom House rather than Polity data, some thirty independent variables, and a different estimation technique. Nevertheless, the correlation between his projection and one derived from the regression reported in table 6 is 0.82, which is markedly higher than the correlation between the actual and fitted values in either analysis (0.74 for this specification and 0.72 for Barro's) and only slightly below the 0.92 correlation between Polity and his democracy measure. Variations in model specification are not significant for my purposes.
156. All nations with data for 2004 are included. To maximize the generality of the result, Polity scores for seven nations are imputed from their one-and two-year lagged values and Freedom House scores, but the estimation is virtually identical with those nations omitted.
157. The average score of neighbors was constructed with the aid of the data described in Douglas M. Stinnett, Jaroslav Tir, Philip Schafer, Paul F. Diehl, and Charles Gochman, "The Correlates of War Project Direct Contiguity Data, Version 3," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 58-66.
158. Only nations separated by a land or river border are considered contiguous. Nations with no contiguous neighbors (islands) are assigned the average score of their region, as designated by the Minorities at Risk Project at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2005, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/. A good example of the finding that neighbor emulation is highly significant even in the presence of elaborate regional controls is Brinks and Coppedge, "Diffusion Is No Illusion."
159. School enrollments are based on gross secondary school enrollment percentages taken from World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2006 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006). Missing data for 2004 was imputed from earlier years in several cases. Using gross domestic product per capita instead of enrollments allows a slightly larger N, but it produces a poorer fit. The coefficient estimates of the other variables are not significantly affected by the choice of enrollments or gross domestic product as a regressor.
160. The Muslim percentage of the population and the dummy variable for oil (defined as more than one-third of exports consisting of fuels) was largely taken from the data set made available online by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ethnic/, and used in Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 75-90.
161. It was augmented by the CIA's World Factbook, 2005, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
162. the World Bank's "Global Development Network Growth Database," http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/. The latter was also the source for the primary product export dummy.
163. For a denial that these findings justify pessimism concerning Arab democracy, see Gary C. Gambill, "Explaining the Arab Democracy Deficit, Part 1," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 2 (February/March 2003).
164. These null findings occur because the predictors, though theoretically divergent, are empirically colinear.
165. This result lends credence to an interactive formulation in which elite actions must occur in the context of supportive structural conditions, such as that found in Doorenspleet, "The Structural Context of Recent Transitions to Democracy." Elite initiatives may highlight democratic transitions, but they cannot really hasten them. As Valerie Bunce puts it in "Comparative Democratization: Big and Bounded Generalizations," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 33, Nos. 6/7 (August/September 2000), p. 708, "Elites are seen as summarizers of long-term developments and as well-positioned representatives of larger social forces."
166. The post-1989 state dummy variable was removed because new states were omitted from the analysis by virtue of missing data on the existence of an EEA at the earlier time point. Including these states by assigning them the values of their predecessor states does not significantly affect the model estimates.
167. In analyses not shown, it was found that established extreme autocracies underperformed extreme autocracies that were not established by 2 to 6 points.
168. Of course, it is not identical to the fifty-year estimate I obtained on the different and more particular question of how long it takes to transit to coherent democracy.
169. The source of the dummy variables is Chappell Lawson and Strom C. Thacker, "Democracy? In Iraq?" Hoover Digest, No. 3 (2005)
170. They identify nineteen instances in which "the United States has occupied or help to occupy countries in the last century with the goal of reshaping their political system," fifteen of which are coded by Polity. They consider Bosnia, Cambodia, Somalia, and South Korea as instances of "truncated or incomplete intervention," whereas Austria, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Haiti, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama, the Philippines, and South Vietnam "experienced more thoroughgoing and protracted occupation." Grenada, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau are too small to be coded by Polity.
171. Both regression results confirm the conclusion reached by examining individually each episode found in a similar list of cases compiled by Minxin Pei and Sara Kaspar, "Lessons from the Past: The American Record of Nation-Building," Policy Brief, No. 24 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2003). Among the fourteen nations for which data are available, only four (Haiti, Germany, Japan, Germany, and Panama) emerged from occupation as democratic. Moreover, forty years after the departure of U.S. troops (or as of 2004 for more recent episodes), only the Dominican Republic could be added to that list and Haiti subtracted. Of the remaining nine, six had a lower level of democracy than when troops left and only one a higher level. In fact, prior to U.S. occupation, only four were coherent autocracies, but forty years after the occupation ended (or in 2004), five of them were coherent autocracies and two others were coded by Polity as in an interregnum or transition state. None of the fourteen had been an established extreme autocracy before occupation. A similar null result for the effect on democracy of 228 U.S. military operations between 1972 and 2003 is reported by John A. Tures, "Operation Exporting Freedom: The Quest for Democratization via United States Military Operations," Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter/Spring 2005), pp. 97-111.
172. See, for example, Thomas Carothers, "The 'Sequencing' Fallacy," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 18, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 12-27.
173. For an elaboration of this argument, see Bunce and Wolchik, "Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions."
174. For an analysis of the post-Soviet and Eastern European states, see the earlier version of this article, Moon, "Can Iraq Democratize?"
175. For a similar conclusion, see Chappell Lawson and Strom C. Thacker, "Will Iraq Become a Democracy?" July 31, 2003, unpublished paper, http://www.bu.edu/sthacker/iraq030731.pdf, p. 14.
176. Using Freedom House data and a much different specification and sample, they "find an expected value for Iraq of 0.16" against an actual value of 0. Lawson and Thacker write, "In other words, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pretty much where we might have expected it to be given its demographic and economic profile."
177. For a peculiar dissent, see Byman and Pollack, "Democracy in Iraq?" p. 124
178. The authors conclude that "Iraq has a reasonably good foundation to make the transition" on the basis of income, literacy rates, and urbanization, factors they cite as having been identified by the structural analysis reported in Barro, "Determinants of Democracy." Byman and Pollack write, "Iraq's numbers are comparable to those of many other states that have enjoyed real progress in the transition from autocracy to democracy, such as Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bolivia." This conclusion is an inexplicable misreading of Barro, who explicitly projects democracy scores (on a 0 to 1 scale) using a much broader prediction equation than the factors cited by Byman and Pollack. Barro's projections for Bangladesh (0.55), Bolivia (0.51), and Kenya (0.40), indicate that Iraq has nowhere near their structural requisites. In fact, Iraq's projection of 0.04 is, by a wide margin, the lowest suitability rating for democracy of any nation in their 101-country sample. The next lowest is Zaire, four times larger at 0.16.
179. None of the successful democratic transitions identified in the earlier historical analysis bucked odds approaching that range; the largest residual, Albania's 6.3, should occur in more than 8 percent of cases.