Abstract
AbstractThe role of citizens' collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is generally analysed within bottom-up theories. However, top-down theories show that elites might impede or promote both democracy and collective action through a set of strategies which are often unobserved and vary over time. Democratic persistence and change require then to be assessed in a dynamic framework which considers both citizens and elites' strategies. For such reason, on a large sample of countries in the period 1971–2014, we jointly estimate the probability of collective action and democracy using a Structural Dynamic Model. This allows us to account for the dynamic nature of the two political phenomena under investigation by controlling for their persistence, for initial conditions and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We find that collective action matters for the emergence of democracy but not for its consolidation which seems to be related to more structural economic factors.
Highlights
There is a growing consensus that institutions matter to explain countries’ differences in economic performances
Our work jointly tests the bottom-up and the top-down approach by introducing a bivariate Structural Dynamic Model (SDM), which allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity
The model provides different insights on how collective action and democracy are jointly related in a purely dynamic framework, which builds on the previous literature
Summary
There is a growing consensus that institutions matter to explain countries’ differences in economic performances (see e.g. North, 1991; Tylecote, 2016). While most scholars address the presence of unobserved heterogeneity by using fixed- or random-effects regression and/or instrumental variables, Marino et al (2020) have recently provided an alternative empirical strategy, which takes into account unobservable factors by using a latent variable and by jointly modelling top-down and bottom-up theories In such a way, they overcome the critical challenge of finding proper instruments in a cross-country framework.. We apply the model to 170 countries from 1971 to 2014 and our results find the role of citizens’ collective action important for democratic change, but not for democratic consolidation Such findings stress the relevance of modelling the interaction between citizens and elites, the dynamic nature of the two political phenomena under investigation and unobservable factors.
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