Is There a Pattern?

Abstract

The countries that experienced a ‘coloured revolution’ between 2000 and 2005 – Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – were not distinguished by their levels of economic development, as political modernization theory suggested. Nor did they distribute incomes more unequally than other countries at the same level of development, as class analysis would have posited. By contrast, perceptions of the political system, and of its levels of corruption and responsiveness, were more closely associated with a series of irregular regime changes that had generally been precipitated by a ‘stolen election’.