Why democracies survive

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 17-30

  Diamond, Larry ^a,b  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Stanford's Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79551618021     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 [1960]), 68-70.
2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 17-18.
3. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2000), 109.
4. Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development, 11. More recently, with a different data set (covering 1960 through 2004) and methodology, Ethan Kapstein and Nathan Converse have found a similar effect for young and therefore fragile democracies: Higher GDP growth, particularly averaging over five years, "is significantly associated with a reduced probability of democratic reversal." The Fate of Young Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 60.
5. That is the implication of the findings of both Przerworski et al. and Kapstein and Converse. As the latter show, for example, older and more economically developed democracies have greater ability to withstand the negative effects of poor economic performance.
6. For elaboration, see Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), ch. 3.
7. Arch Puddington, "The 2008 Freedom House Survey: A Third Year of Decline," Journal of Democracy 20 (April 2009): 98,
8. and "The Freedom House Survey for 2009: The Erosion Accelerates," Journal of Democracy 21 (April 2010): 136.
9. Evidence of this, and other supporting documentation is available at www.journalof-democracy.org/articles/gratis/DiamondGraphics-22-1.pdf.
10. And in these cases, it is hard to distinguish cause from effect. It is possible, in other words, that the sudden implosion of political stability might have contributed to the economic downturn (via the familiar route of loss of investor confidence).
11. The explanation for these measures of governance can be found in Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, "Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996-2008," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4978, 29 June 2009, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=1424591#. [End Page 29]
12. Kapstein and Converse, Fate of Young Democracies, 68.
13. This counts both presidential and parliamentary election results in semipresidential systems such as Slovakia's, but not concurrent or midterm legislative results in presidential systems such as those of Mexico or Venezuela.
14. This excludes a small number of elections in this period where it is difficult to interpret who the incumbent was or what fate they met, as in Poland or Bangladesh, which was returning to democracy after two years of military rule.
15. "Bulgaria Opposition Wins Election," BBC News, 6 July 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8134851.stm.
16. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Igor Munteanu, "Moldova's 'Twitter Revolution,'" Journal of Democracy 20 (July 2009): 136-42.
17. "Panama Election: Supermarket Millionaire Ricardo Martinelli Wins Presidency," Telegraph (London), 4 May 2009, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/panama/5270318/ Panam-election-supermarket-millionaire-Ricardo-Martinelli-wins-presidency.html.
18. "Billionaire Beats Rivals in Chile's Presidential Election," CBC News, 13 December 2009, available at www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/12/13/ chile-election.html?ref=rss.
19. Forrest D. Colburn, "The Turnover in El Salvador," Journal of Democracy 20 (July 2009): 146.
20. Colburn, "Turnover in El Salvador," 144, 143.
21. For elections in the first quarter of a year, I took the economic-growth rate from the preceding year. If I had also done that for Hungary regarding its April 2010 elections, the results in Table 2 would have been even more striking, as the ruling party would have lost in a climate of sharp economic decline. [End Page 30]