Civil Society and the Development of Democracy (2025)

Consolidation of New Democracy, Mass Attitudes, and Clientelism

American Economic Review, 2009

When democracy is new it is often fragile or unconsolidated, meaning that important political groups lack full commitment to the democratic process, so that its survival is not assured. What economic policies can a government use to try to prevent a reversion to autocracy? One answer to this question begins with the argument that the threat to democracy comes from anti-democratic elites-the army, groups such as the wealthy who bene…tted most under the old regime, the "oligarchs"-who are seen as basically anti-democratic and who have the power to overthrow the new democratic regime. The "masses" are seen as unambiguously pro-democratic. Under this view, policy to consolidate democracy should focus on placating the anti-democratic elites, or, colloquially but not inaccurately, to "buy them o¤." This approach has received a superb treatment in Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2005). Targeted economic policy to consolidate democracy can be viewed more generally. Survival of democracy (and policy to enhance that) can be thought of in terms of two fundamental questions. The …rst is: How does the support of di¤erent actors a¤ect the probability that democracy survives? The second is then: How do these important actors choose whether or not to support the continuation of democracy or its overthrow? The design of policy to address democratic fragility depends on the answers to these two basic questions. The policy prescription in the previous paragraph, for example, follows from the answers: it is the elites alone who are determinate; and, their support depends on giving them enough that they are content not to overthrow democracy. Our research on the fragility of new democracies focusses on di¤erent, but complementary issues. While we agree that anti-democratic elites pose a serious threat to fragile

Democratization: the role of elites

After having recalled the essential features of real-existing democracies (REDs) the chapter discusses different modes of democratization and the role of political elites in these processes. The special nature of transitional situations and the greater freedom of action they allow for elites are highlighted. The relationships between political elites and other actors (such as the military, or religious and ethnic groups, the bourgeoisie, etc.) are then explored showing also how they have changed over time.

Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship (World Politics 2007)

World Politics, 2008

Democratization: Social, Economic and Civic Constituents of the Democratic Consolidation

ESA 2013 Patrushev Pavlova Philippova Cliquecracy as the form of quasi-democratic regime consolidation

Consolidated democracy is the result of institutional interaction between autonomous civil, political and economic spaces based on the rule of law and supported by the usable state. Democracy determines ways of citizens' inclusion in the political process and thus the nature of political regime; where there are no significant actors trying to create non-democratic regime, the majority of public opinion believes in democratic procedures and does not support antisystem alternatives and, finally, all political actors resolve conflicts within the framework of democratic laws and institutions.

The Rise of Communal Democracies in the East

Perhaps more than any other political notion in our times, democracy has reached remarkable levels of universal reception. It seems as if in some abstract way, democracy has been embraced by nearly all regimes. It has developed into its own creed, elevated to the religion of the political world. Ironically, even regimes that would be easily classified as nondemocratic, under traditional definitions, happily invoke the word to remain in the "circle of the faithful". While calling someone a democrat has become a term of endearment, denying or even questioning democracy's merits has been tantamount to committing a primordial sin, rendering one an outcast to the political community. One would be hard pressed to find a regime left in the world that is not a self-proclaimed democracy (irrespective of its practices). By all means, therefore, it appears as though democracy has turned into the most powerful source for "just" authority, prescribed as panacea to the woes of all regimes. Both friends and foes of the democratic conception drink from its fountain to be blessed with credibility. Yet in its universality, democracy has lost its specificity; it has been interpreted inconsistently by different regimes across different contexts to justify regime sovereignty.

The Transition to Democracy : Collective Action and Intra-elite Confict

This paper studies how intra-elite con ‡ict results in transition to democracy, characterized as both franchise extension to, and lowering the individual cost of collective political action for, an initially disorganized non-elite. Two risk averse elites compete for the appropriation of a unit of social surplus with initial uncertainty about their future relative bargaining power. Both elements of a democracy are necessary to ensure that the two elites credibly commit to a mutually fairer share of the surplus and we derive su¢ cient conditions for democracy to emerge in equilibrium. Our formal analysis accounts for stylized facts that emerge from an analysis of Indian and West European democracies.

Democracy and Social Forces

Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description

SSRN Electronic Journal

* This paper is the result of a collaborative effort and authors are therefore listed in alphabetic order. Nonetheless, Laura Maxwell and Matthew C. Wilson deserve special credits for doing most of the data analyses and writing.

Democratic Transitions and Democratic Breakdowns: The Elite Variable Hart1yn

1984

Stable democratic regimes depend heavily on the "consensual unity " of national elites. So long as elites remain disunified, political regimes are unstable, a condition which makes democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns merely temporary oscillations in the forms unstable regimes take. Disunity appears to be the generic condition of national elites, and disunity strongly tends to persist regardless of socioeconomic development and other changes in mass populations. The consensually unified elites that are necessary to stable democracies are created in only a few ways, two of the most important of which involve distinctive elite transformations. After elaborating this argument, we examine the relationship between elites and regimes in western nation-states since they began to consolidate after 1500. We show that our approach makes good sense of the western political record, that it does much to clarify prospects for stable democracies in developing societies today,...

Institutional Subsystems and the Survival of Democracy: Do Political and Civil Society Matter?

How do two central institutional subsystems of democracy -party systems and civil society -affect the persistence of democratic regimes? Despite the ability of each of these institutions to provide sources of countervailing power that make politicians accountable and thus responsive, distributionist accounts of democratic breakdown provide few insights on how such institutions may encourage parties to reach accommodation. We argue that these institutions provide credible threats against anti-system activities that would otherwise threaten the democratic compromise. We test our argument with newly available data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project by analyzing all episodes of democratic breakdown from 1900-2001. Using a split population event history estimator, we find evidence that these institutions not only forestall the timing of breakdowns among transitional democracies but also that a strong party system is critical to setting democratic regimes on the path of

The Fate of Former Authoritarian Elites Under Democracy

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019

Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through re-election or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this question using an original dataset on constitutional origins and the fate of the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites across Latin America from 1900-2015. I find that authoritarian elites from outgoing regimes that impose a holdover constitution that sticks through democratization are more likely to regain political or economic power––especially through national positions where the potential payoffs are largest––and less likely to face severe or nominal punishment. I also find a positive role for political capital among former elites. These results are robust to alternative explanations of authoritarian elites' fate and using instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity. The findings have important implications for democratic consolidation and quality.

Disaggregating Political Regime: Conceptual Issues in the Study of Democratization

The increasingly global scope of democratization has challenged comparativists to engage in crossregional research as part of a collective enterprise. The response to such a challenge, however, hinges upon their ability to both base their research on a set of clear concepts, a prerequisite for theory-building, and clarify their method of case selection, a prerequisite for theory-testing. While these conceptual issues have yet to be fully resolved, I show how the work of a group of 'regime analysts' provides the best starting point for scholars interested in this enterprise. For this purpose, I show how the disaggregation of the concept of political regime provides the basis for a distinction among three analytically separable problems, the process of transition, the outcome of this process of transition, and the process of consolidation, and for more nuanced distinctions in terms of modes of transition, regime types and subtypes, and degrees of consolidation. I also show how the problem of conceptual stretching is avoided by regime analysts in the course of case selection through the vertical organization of their concepts along a ladder of generality and the application of a simple rule. Finally, I show how the study of political regimes on the basis of quantitative indices of democracy fails to avoid the problems of conceptual conflation and conceptual stretching.

Authoritarian-Led Democratization

Annual Review of Political Science

Authoritarian regimes become more likely to democratize when they face little choice or little risk. In some cases, the risk of democratization to authoritarian incumbents is so low that ending authoritarianism might not mean exiting power at all. This article develops a unified theory of authoritarian-led democratization under conditions of relatively low incumbent risk. We argue that the party strength of the authoritarian incumbent is the most pivotal factor in authoritarian-led democratization. When incumbent party strength has been substantial enough to give incumbent authoritarian politicians significant electoral victory confidence, nondemocratic regimes have pursued reversible democratic experiments that eventually culminated in stable, thriving democracies. Evidence from Europe's first wave of democratization and more recent democratic transitions in Taiwan and Ghana illustrate how party strength has underpinned authoritarian-led democratization across the world and acr...

The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns

American Sociological Review, 1989

»Die Rolle von Eliten in demokratischen Transitionsprozessen und beim Zusammenbruch von Demokratien«. Stable democratic regimes depend heavily on the "consensual unity" of national elites. So long as elites remain disunified, political regimes are unstable, a condition which makes democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns merely temporary oscillations in the forms unstable regimes take. Disunity appears to be the generic condition of national elites, and disunity strongly tends to persist regardless of socioeconomic development and other changes in mass populations. The consensually unified elites that are necessary to stable democracies are created in only a few ways, two of the most important of which involve distinctive elite transformations. After elaborating this argument, we examine the relationship between elites and regimes in Western nation-states since they began to consolidate after 1500. We show that our approach makes good sense of the Western political record, that it does much to clarify prospects for stable democracies in developing societies today, and that it makes the increasingly elite-centered analysis of democratic transitions and breakdowns more systematic.

Introduction: democratization in the early twenty-first century

Democratization, 2004

Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transform-ation of authoritarian and 'totalitarian' political regimes into pluralist democ-racies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of ...

AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES: STABILITY, CHANGE, AND PATHWAYS TO DEMOCRACY, 1972–2003 @BULLET

Jan Teorell is associate professor of political science at Lund University. He has published on intra-party politics, social capital, and political participation, and, with Axel Hadenius, is now involved in a project on the determinants of democratization. • Acknowledgements: Funding for this project was provided by the Swedish Research Council. We would like to thank Emilie Anér for excellent research assistance.

Institutions as battleground. Democratic implications of initial institution building in post-communist regimes

Democracy in Central Europe, 1989

On the Relationship between Regime Approval and Democratic Transition

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2011

The Role of Constitution-Building Processes in Democratization

2005