Democratic Reversals Research Articles

Resurgent Coup d’États, Democratic Reversals, and Geopolitical Shifts in Africa

Resurgent Coup d’États, Democratic Reversals, and Geopolitical Shifts in Africa

Leaders’ experience and the transition from populism to dictatorship

ABSTRACT A growing body of research shows that although populists draw on mass support to weaken executive constraints, they rarely transition to personalist autocracy. This raises the question of how and why only a few populist leaders have been able to leverage mass support to establish personal authoritarian rule? Whereas previous studies have addressed this in terms of deep social and economic crises or the durability of formal and informal democratic institutions, we focus on the agency of populist leaders themselves. Specifically, we theorize that more experienced leaders are better able to capture state institutions and ultimately establish authoritarian rule, particularly if they inherit more malleable institutions at entry into office. We present a newly enlarged dataset of populist rule, which confirms that the transition to full dictatorship is rare. We find that political experience has a robust positive association with full democratic reversals, while controlling for other factors. Moreover, this relationship is pronounced in contexts where institutional regulations are less rigid. However, we find little evidence of an independent effect of a priori institutional weakness on democratic survival. Our findings have implications for the literatures on populism, democratic backsliding, and political leadership.

Public attitudes toward external democracy promotion in Africa

ABSTRACT The proliferation of democratic rule in Africa has been accompanied by external involvement in fostering democracy. The African Union along with various regional organizations have included clauses in their treaties calling for member-state adherence to democratic governance. Moreover, African regional organizations have used punishments such as membership suspension, sanctions, and military force to motivate states experiencing democratic reversals to change course. However, despite these trends, there has been no investigation into how Africans perceive external involvement in fostering democracy. This study remedies this gap by evaluating public attitudes toward such external pressure using the sixth round of the Afrobarometer survey. Specifically, the study explores how individual assessment of electoral practice and a country's and its neighbours' history of unconstitutional changes of government influence approval of external democracy promotion. This article lays the foundation for further investigating the roots of legitimacy of actions taken by international organizations aimed at promoting good governance and democracy.

Latent territorial threat and democratic regime reversals

Why do some democracies revert to non-democratic forms of governance? We develop an explanation of democratic reversals that emphasizes the influence of states’ external border relations on domestic politics. Latent threats to a state’s territory encourage political centralization of authority in the executive to defend against danger to the homeland. Latent territorial threat also facilitates the construction and maintenance of large land armies to fight threatening neighbors. Combined, latent territorial threat increases leaders’ domestic power, weakens democratic institutions, encourages other conditions threatening democratic survival, and, ultimately, leads to democratic reversals. Synthesizing prior research on territorial conflict, we generate a quantitative, continuous measure of latent territorial threat against all democracies with contiguous neighbors from 1946 to 2016, using Bayesian estimation. Empirical tests accounting for measurement uncertainty and other common determinants of reversals as well as brief reviews of individual cases of reversal provide robust evidence that democracy failed at higher rates in countries facing high levels of threats to their territory from neighbors. Our study implies that a complete account of the development of democratic institutions should emphasize that domestic factors alone fall short of explaining why democracies fail.

Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti

Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. However, existing theory has been largely silent on the role of elite social networks, which interact with economic incentives and may facilitate antidemocratic collective action. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the effort an elite puts into a coup is increasing in their network centrality. We empirically explore the model using an original dataset of Haitian elite networks that we linked to firm-level data. We show that central families were more likely to be accused of participating in the 1991 coup against the democratic Aristide government. We then find that the retail prices of staple goods that are imported by such elites differentially increase during subsequent periods of nondemocracy. Our results suggest that elite social structure is an important factor in democratic reversals.

Роль публичной дипломатии США в политической трансформации Венгрии в 1989-1990 гг.

The research objective includes identifying the role and place of the USA public diplomacy in Hungary in the period of political transformations (1989-1990) and in the course of the first democratic elections of 1990. The article examines activity of the American non-commercial organizations (National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society Foundation) that promoted the swift change of Hungary’s political regime in 1989-1990. Scientific originality of the study involves revealing the basic factors that influenced grant policies of the American non-commercial funds in the period of democratic reversals in the region. The conducted research has allowed the author to identify the target audience and to estimate efficiency of the USA public diplomacy programs in the period of Hungary’s political transformation.

Challenging the East Asian Development Model: Evidence from South Korea

The resurgence of the East Asian development model has seen alarming trends of populist-authoritarianism as well as democratic reversals. Yet, the core argument—strong, unconstrained governments successfully motivate or compel compliance—is rarely assessed. This paper makes that systematic assessment with historical data and survey findings from South Korea, the prototypical East Asian model. Two findings are consequential: first, strong, unconstrained governments led to higher-than-normal disinvestments; this occurs notwithstanding in- or out-of-favour sectors. This means that government could not strong-arm or exploit out-of-favour producers to abide by policies that favour other sectors. Second, surveys analysed show that almost 40% have or would engage in political actions that challenged the government, despite the latter’s strength or autocracy. This means that citizens, of which labour is a large component, were also willing to disobey the government’s policies or directives. Together, the results challenge the model that strong government may successfully override preferences to push or even compel the compliance that underpins economic success.

Democratic reversals and the size of government

While the fiscal and redistributive consequences of democracy is one of the central debates in political economy, most empirical studies analyze this question solely in the context of transitions to democracy. In this paper, we explore the consequences to taxation of democratic reversal using the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans in the US South between 1880 and 1910. Following the federally-imposed extension of the franchise to the former slaves during Reconstruction (1865–1877), Southern states erected a series of legal restrictions, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, aimed primarily at preventing Southern African Americans from registering to vote. Using an original dataset of local and state taxes and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, we demonstrate that the adoption of literacy tests for voting eligibility in each state was followed by a significant decline in tax revenues that is highly correlated to the share of each county's population who was African American. We also find that black disenfranchisement led to a shift of the tax burden onto urban counties and a greater reliance on indirect taxation. Our results survive a battery of robustness checks, alternative specifications and additional tests of the redistributionist thesis. The findings are not only consistent with standard models of redistribution following democratization, but also indicate that the elasticity of taxes with respect to enfranchisement is substantial and larger than the one suggested by the cross-national literature.

Gendered Strategies between Democratization and Democratic Reversal: The Curious Case of Turkey

The processes of democratization or democratic reversal have serious implications for gender equality regimes. Although the gender and transition literature has extensively examined the relation between democratization and gender, it only recently began to question how the changing dynamics of democratic reversal influence gender politics and policies. While women’s participation and representation in the formal arena of politics has been the primary object of theoretical discussions, the research rediscovers the power of the informal arena. To find tentative answers to the newly developing research agenda, this article employs the case of Turkey. To this end, the article examines the gendered strategies of four groups of organized women (feminist, Kurdish, Islamist, and Kemalist women’s organizations) engaged in strengthening women’s rights and gender equality. It first questions how, and to what extent, organized women en<em>gendered </em>democratization process and then sheds lights on the shift in their strategies to respond to the increasingly authoritarian and conservative Islamist political agenda of the ruling Justice and Development Party. Drawing on empirical findings, the article aims to inform the theoretical debates on the analytical relation between democratic reversals and gender rights regimes.

‘I do not know who won the elections’: How Not to Conduct Elections and Kenya’s Democratic Reversals

The role of election management bodies (EMBs) in consolidation of democracy, peace and stability in Africa cannot be overemphasised. Kenya’s electoral bodies have struggled to assert their autonomy from the executive, a prerequisite for credible elections, since the advent of multiparty politics in 1991. The violently disputed presidential elections in 2007 were partly triggered by a partisan and politicised electoral body. The Chairman of the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) controversially declared the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, winner, igniting unprecedented ethnic violence. In the midst of the crisis, he explosively confessed that he did not know who won the elections. The 2013 elections were meant to restore Kenyans’ confidence in elections. However, Raila Odinga, the controversial presidential loser in 2007, once again accused the electoral body, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), of electoral fraud in favour of Uhuru Kenyatta. Consequently, the opposition called for the disbandment of the IEBC. Are electoral bodies per se the cause of perennial disputed elections in Kenya?

The Effect of Terrorism on Judicial Confidence

Independent judiciaries prevent democratic reversals, facilitate peaceful transitions of power, and legitimate democracy among citizens. We believe this judicial independence is important for citizen-level judicial confidence and faith in democratic institutions. I challenge this and argue that citizens living under terror threats lose confidence in their independent judiciaries. Terror threats lead citizens to enable the state leader to provide counterterrorism for their security, which has important implications for interbranch relations between the executive and the judiciary. Citizens lose confidence in independent judiciaries that provide due process for suspected terrorists. I test my argument with mixed effects models that incorporate the Global Terrorism Database and four waves of European Values Survey. The analyses demonstrate the negative effects of terror threats on judicial confidence when interacting terror threats with measures of judicial independence. My findings have important implications for the study of democratic confidence and the liberty-security dilemma.

Eyes Wide Shut: Democratic Reversals, Scientific Closure, and the Study of Politics in Eurasia*

ObjectivesThe article examines the relationship between democratic reversals and scientific closure. It focuses on the effects that authoritarian and hybrid regimes are likely to have on the ways scholars study them and conduct their fieldwork.MethodThematic content analysis of articles on Eurasian politics published over a 10‐year period, with particular attention paid to reported methods and fieldwork.ResultsScientific closure had as much to do with research cycles in the discipline as with democratic reversals. Notions of the region as democratizing persisted into the 2000s as scholars recycled data and conceptual frames from the 1990s. Fieldwork‐driven research was more likely to detect autocratization.ConclusionWhile disciplinary consensus reframed the region as autocratizing, the field remains vulnerable to scientific closure. Aside from the challenges posed by autocracies for fieldwork, the new disciplinary consensus may deter qualitative fieldwork and innovation in studying authoritarianism in Eurasia.

Does Democracy Deliver in Islamic Societies?

Is Islam compatible with democracy? While recent developments in Northern Africa and the Middle East have added new urgency to this question, the literature seems stuck with an apparent paradox of Muslims expressing a strong desire for democracy, but democratic institutions not actually taking hold in the Islamic world. We contribute to the debate by shifting the focus to the sustainability of democratic institutions, which is a function of support for democratic institutions in practice rather than of the desirability of democracy as an ideal. We contrast the standard culturalist perspective that argues that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democratic institutions (the clash-of-civilizations view) with a modernization perspective that finds that the legitimacy of democratic institutions in Muslim (or other newly democratizing) societies hinges critically on these institutions delivering the individual freedom and welfare gains that are expected from them. Key novelty is that we provide an ex-post assessment of whether democracy indeed improves the lives of people in the Muslim world, also analyzing potential causes -- rooted in Islam or otherwise -- of a failure of democracy to deliver. We start by estimating inter-societal differences in the gains in happiness, freedom and income caused by democratic institutions. If democracy has a weaker positive effect on these variables in Muslim societies, we interpret this as an indication that democracy delivers less in Muslim societies, making disappointment with the functioning of democracy and democratic reversals more likely. Our results indicate that democracy indeed delivers less freedom in Muslim societies than it does elsewhere. However, the evidence also shows that were democracy to bring Muslim societies the same levels of perceived individual freedom and welfare as it does in the rest of the world, people in Muslim societies would appreciate democracy just as much. We conclude that the lower support for existing democracies in Muslim societies has more to do with the nature of those democratic regimes than with underlying Islamic values or beliefs.

Overcoming Dilemmas of Democratisation: Protecting Civil Liberties and the Right to Democracy

The on-going global shift toward democratic government, vividly joined in recent years by the Arab World, is tempered by the many challenges of democratic transitions. The toppling of an autocratic leader does not automatically mean the rise of democracy. Elections do not guarantee the protection of civil liberties. And democratic leaders are not immune from the seductions of power and the incentives of dismantling democracy’s institutional checks and balances. The costs to a society and the international community for democratic reversals are high in terms of civil liberties, human rights, human development and political instability. Strengthening international legal instruments including mechanisms to enhance accountability for violence against journalists and proscribe the subversion of democratic institutions as a crime against democracy can help overcome these conundrums.

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

Examining onsets of political instability in countries worldwide from 1955 to 2003, we develop a model that distinguishes countries that experienced instability from those that remained stable with a two‐year lead time and over 80% accuracy. Intriguingly, the model uses few variables and a simple specification. The model is accurate in forecasting the onsets of both violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals, suggesting common factors in both types of change. Whereas regime type is typically measured using linear or binary indicators of democracy/autocracy derived from the 21‐point Polity scale, the model uses a nonlinear five‐category measure of regime type based on the Polity components. This new measure of regime type emerges as the most powerful predictor of instability onsets, leading us to conclude that political institutions, properly specified, and not economic conditions, demography, or geography, are the most important predictors of the onset of political instability.

Perilous Polities? An Assessment of the Democratization-Conflict Linkage

While evidence continues to mount that democracies resort to military force reluctantly, the transition to democracy may in fact be a dangerous and conflictual one. Given the emphasis now being put on democratization, a reassessment of the relationship between the stability of domestic institutions and interstate conflict seems fitting. To date, the evidence remains mixed. No clear consensus has emerged on whether regime transition either increases or decreases conflict propensities. Employing a logit specification with splines and robust standard errors, this research analyzes the conflict behavior of transitioning states for the 1950—2000 period. The results indicate that `rocky' transitions or democratic reversals increase the likelihood of conflict occurrence. I demonstrate, however, that this result is driven by the conflict behavior of autocratizing countries. An interaction term shows that although regime change itself may increase conflict propensities, such exacerbating effects are reversed for democratizing states.

Regional Integration and Democratic Consolidation in the Southern Cone of Latin America

Regional integration has been a significant factor shaping the consolidation processes of southern cone democratizing states. Regional integration strategies have allowed transitional regimes across the southern cone to neutralize threats of democratic reversals by military leaders, effectively undermining the long-standing geostrategic rationales used by foreign policy and military elites to justify military intervention in domestic politics. The dramatic rise of interstate co-operation has accelerated and ensured the consolidation of democracy across the region through regional trade blocs, the development of an embedded regional commitment to democracy, and a 'defence of democracy' regime. At the same time, democratization has enhanced regional economic and security integration strategies, through increased domestic transparency, the impact of pro-democratic ideational forces and the externalization of democratic principles. 'Structurational' analysis of the processes of democratic consolidation in Brazil and Argentina is used to demonstrate the influence of economic integration and the emergent regional security regime on democratic consolidation, as well as the role democratization played in facilitating these developments in regional integration.

Beyond “Whose reality counts?” New methods we now need?1

Activities called PRA, and its equivalents in other languages, have evolved from a confluence, sharing and adaptation of methodologies,2 methods and participatory traditions. Synergies have generated new things to do and new ways to do them, including visual forms of analysis. A conjunction of conditions has produced an explosion of activities and applications, and spread to many countries and organisations - NGOs, Government departments, and even universities, and raised questions of ethics and of sharing methodologies. Coming from our different traditions, should we seek places of convergence and spring-boards for action? If so, could the concept of responsible wellbeing, and the question “Whose reality counts?” provide us with common ground? They fit with eclectic pluralism, a celebration of diversity, and democratic reversals of dominance. They raise shared issues of how we teach, learn, and construct realities, of dominant institutions and their cultures, and of personal power. They point towards responsible wellbeing for “uppers” being sought in empowering and privileging the realities of “lowers”. Do we now have a phenomenal opportunity? We have participatory methodologies which are powerful, popular and self-spreading. We have new space opened up by government and donor agency policies for participation and poverty reduction. Rapid spread has brought much bad practice. At the same time, PRA and other participatory methodologies have also shown a potential to contribute to changes at levels which are policy-related, institutional and personal. To make the most of these opportunities invites sharing methods and experience between different traditions, and inventing new methods. Five methodological challenges now (May 1997) stand out as points of leverage. These are how better to: 1. enable the realities and priorities of poor and marginalised people to be expressed and communicated to policy-makers 2. enable trainers to facilitate attitude and behaviour change 3. make normal bureaucracies more participatory 4. build self-improvement into the spread of participatory methodologies 5. enable people with power to find fulfilment in disempowering themselves Could it be that effective repertoires for these could lead to much good change? Could convergences and sharings of experiences and approaches among us contribute to such repertoires? Could we between us seize these opportunities in the new spaces which are opening up?