Effect Of Regime Type Research Articles

Revolution and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century

In this article, we analyze an inverted U-shaped relationship between the type of regime (on the autocracy-democracy scale) and the risks of revolutionary destabilization. Anocracies tend to be more vulnerable to revolutionary destabilization than full autocracies or full (consolidated) democracies. We also point to a strong positive association between the weakening of autocracies and the risks of revolutionary destabilization that exist among full autocracies. In addition, full autocracies moving towards democracy and transitioning to partial autocratic rule are at increased risk of revolutionary destabilization, which explains why the current global spread of democracy is associated with an upswing rather than a downswing in revolutionary activity. Finally, strong forms of revolutionary destabilization are quite possible in cases of deconsolidation of consolidated democracy, which additionally suggests that the era of revolutions will not end in the foreseeable future. Thus, we propose a general theory on the effect of regime type on revolutionary destabilization and address inconsistencies among various studies regarding the impact of the regime on revolutionary instability. The conducted research also allows us to contribute to the answer to the question posed by many researchers of revolutions at the end of the last century – will the era of revolutions end with the global spread of democracy? Our analysis suggests that if this happens someday, it will not be in any foreseeable future.

State capacity matters in ‘the middle:’ A new perspective on domestic terrorism

When it comes to domestic terrorism (DT), state capacity matters in ‘the middle.’ Our article aims to bring together two apparently separate strands of terrorism research: one concerning the effects of regime type; and another concerning the effects of state capacity. We argue that state capacity can reduce DT in anocracies, but not so much in full dictatorships and democracies. Terrorists seek to maximize the reach of their attacks by exposing themselves to a larger audience. As a result, regimes with higher audience costs tend to be more vulnerable to domestic terror attacks. In anocracies, there is room for state capacity to influence the audience costs of a domestic terrorist attack. In full democracies and dictatorships, on the other hand, state capacity has little influence on the audience costs of DT. Consequently, if previous studies have purported linear, U-shaped, and inverted- U-shaped links between democracy and terrorism, we argue that the shape of the relationship is contingent on the level of state capacity. Theoretically, we substantiate our argument with a two-player simultaneous game between a terrorist group and a government. On the empirical side, we conduct a series of negative binomial panel regressions upon a time-series cross-sectional dataset of no less than 108 countries from 1970 to 2007.

Snatching Legal Victory: LGBTQ Rights Activism and Contestation in the Arab World

Abstract This article examines the relationship between emergent LGBTQ movements and the state in the Arab world over the past two decades. Focusing on the efforts of various LGBTQ social movements to confront the criminalization of homosexuality in the Arab region, the article puzzles over a cascade of legal victories for LGBTQ rights advocates in Lebanon in recent years in spite of a hostile justice sector mired with corruption. It interrogates a set of prevalent assumptions about the effect of regime type (democracy v. authoritarianism) on gay rights activism and litigation. This article explains how some LGBTQ Arab movements have successfully relied on strategic litigation to confront criminalization laws while others have had less success in pursuing overtly confrontational approaches. The paired comparison between Tunisia and Lebanon shifts our focus back to the agency of judges and social movement leaders in shaping legal outcomes for LGBTQ citizens.

Regime types and winner-loser Gaps in support for democracy in East Asia

ABSTRACT What is the effect of regime type on democratic support among political winners and losers? Existing studies on the winner-loser gap in political attitudes mostly discuss satisfaction with democracy and political trust without testing the conditional effect of political regimes. We argue that because winners and losers have different understandings of the word “democracy,” support for democracy as an ideal political system is not a valid measurement of democratic support in autocracies. In this article, we examine support for liberal democratic values in different regime types. We find a clear winner-loser gap in competitive authoritarian regimes since supporters of the ruling parties are less enthusiastic about democratic principles that would constrain executive power than those who support the opposition. In democracies, this gap is much smaller as all voters may become political underdogs after free and fair elections; both winners and losers prefer civil liberties and limited executive power, therefore they uphold democratic values at similar levels. We test our argument using four waves of the Asian Barometer Survey.

Democracy, regime duration, and growth

Findings of regularities in statistical relationships between regime type and economic growth are debatable, because specifications are variable. We argue that the effect of regime type on growth is contingent on the duration of the regime. Further, the effect of duration depends on regime type: older autocracies grow at a different rate than older democracies. The reason is that the causes for decelerating growth are fundamentally different in democracies and autocracies. Our estimations are run on a large (unbalanced) annual panel of 155 countries from 1950 – 2006. In this sample, autocracies grew around 0.75 percentage points more slowly than non-autocracies, holding constant the regime-specific effect of regime duration. Autocratic growth rises for the first 30 years, after which growth rates fall rapidly. Non-autocracies always grow faster than equally old autocracies, but the differences are especially pronounced when young and old regimes are compared. Some implications of this result for the political system of Brazil are discussed.

Foreign direct investment and democratic survival: a sectoral approach

ABSTRACT How do foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows affect democratic survival? No study has examined how FDI influences the likelihood of democratic survival, although many studies have studied the effect of regime type on FDI inflows. The previous finding that FDI contributes to authoritarian survival and decreases prospects for democratization does not answer this question since determinants of democratic transitions are clearly distinct from those of democratic survival. I argue that FDI in non-primary sectors is more likely than FDI in primary sectors to contribute to democratic survival since non-primary FDI is likely to produce growth-enhancing effects through upstream and downstream linkages in the host economy and facilitate the diffusion of democratic ideas and norms originating from the West. To overcome the problem of the sectoral FDI data's poor coverage, I exploit an exogenous variation in FDI inflows by utilizing a country's geographical distance from developed economies. Using a sample of democracies from 1970 to 2010, I find that inward FDI, instrumented by market proximity to developed economies, is associated with an increased likelihood of democratic survival. The analysis of primary and non-primary FDI also provides supporting evidence.

정치체제가 경제 위기 대응에 미치는 영향 : 2008년 세계 금융 위기의 경험을 중심으로

대외경제적 충격에 효과적으로 대응하는데 있어 민주주의와 권위주의 체제 사이에 유의미한 차이가 존재하는가? 경제의 성공적인 운용이 정치체제의 안정과 불안정에 미치는 중대한 영향을 고려할때, 이 질문에 대한 답을 찾는 것은 중요한 과제라고 할 수 있으며, 이는 또 한번의 세계적 금융위기에 대한 전망이 점차 제기되는 상황에서 특히 그러하다고 할 수 있다. 본고는 민주주의가 그 제도적 특성 상 대외경제적 충격에 대응하는데 있어 불리하다는 이론을 제시한다. 즉, 민주주의는 권위주의 체제에 비해 정책을 수립하고 집행하는 데 있어 더 많은 제도적 단계를 거쳐야 하기 때문에, 대외적 위기에 적시에 그리고 집중적으로 대응하기 어렵다는 것이다. 전세계 각국에 동시에 영향을 미쳤던 2008년 세계 금융 위기의 사례를 활용한 경험적 분석은 위 이론을 뒷받침해준다. 각종 통제 변수를 포함한 통계 분석은 민주주의의 수준과 2009년의 경제성장률로 측정한 경제의 성공적인 운용 사이에 음의 상관관계가 존재함을 보여준다.

Domestic Terrorism in Democratic States: Understanding and Addressing Minority Grievances

Scholars continue to disagree on the relationship between regime type and political violence, perhaps because the empirical evidence remains contradictory. To date, most studies generally explore the direct relationship between democracy and terrorism. Yet, we think the effect of regime type on terrorism is conditional on the presence of politically excluded groups whose grievances motivate them to challenge the state. We need to take into account both willingness/grievance and opportunity to understand political violence. Using a global data set of domestic terrorism between 1990 and 2012, we find that different regime-associated features of democracy relate differently to domestic terrorism. Higher levels of the rule of law tend to decrease terrorism, whereas electoral democracies tend to experience more domestic terrorism. However, domestic terrorism increases in every form of democracy in the presence of political exclusion. As such, an effective counterterrorism policy must address underlying grievances as democratization by itself may actually drive domestic terrorism up.

When are similar regimes more likely to form alliances? Institutions and ideologies in the post-communist world

Following the collapse of the old communist regimes, 28 post-communist countries chose from among three main foreign security arrangements: commonwealth of independent states (CIS)/collective security treaty organization (CSTO) membership, north atlantic treaty organization (NATO) membership, or neutrality. What explains these choices? We are most interested theoretically in the role played by regime type. The alliances literature typically uses a narrow institutional theory of the effects of regime type, which implies that more democratic regimes are more attractive alliance partners than more authoritarian regimes. Post-communist area specialists will be aware that this institutional theory fails to explain the apparent tendency of more authoritarian post-communist regimes to join the CIS/CSTO. We develop a broader ideological theory of how regime type affects alliances, in which political institutions are complemented by substantive ideological and policy goals. Applying the ideological approach to the post-communist world, we define and measure two main ideological regime types – liberal nationalist regimes and neo-communist authoritarian regimes. Multinomial logit regressions indicate that more democratic, liberal nationalist regimes are more likely to affiliate with NATO, whereas more authoritarian, neo-communist regimes are more likely to join the CIS/CSTO. Moreover, the desire of neo-communist authoritarianism regimes to affiliate with the CIS/CSTO is as strong or stronger than that of neo-liberal democracies to affiliate with NATO – largely because NATO is more reluctant than Russia to accept aspirants. We conclude that the ideological approach to regime type may offer significant explanatory value as a refinement of the institutional approach.

Government Turnover and the Effects of Regime Type

Incumbents voluntarily leaving office after losing elections is a hallmark of democracy. Hence, the most prominent binary democracy measure (Democracy–Dictatorship/Alvarez–Cheibub–Limongi–Przeworski [DD/ACLP]) requires observed alternation in power to score regimes democratic. Such “alternation rules” may, however, lead to underestimating democracy’s effect on economic growth. As strong economic performance reduces the probability of incumbents losing democratic elections, young democracies with high growth may falsely be coded dictatorships; their popular governments have yet to lose an election. We identify the expected bias using different tests, for example, when following Przeworski et al.’s advice to re-estimate relationships after re-coding multi-party regimes without alternation as democratic, or when employing differences in information about alternation from different time points to contrast original DD estimates with our “real-time” DD estimates. We present resembling arguments on how alternation rules may bias democracy’s estimated relationships with civil war onsets and coups, but find fewer empirical indications of biases here.

Dangerous Neighbours, Regional Territorial Conflict and the Democratic Peace

The likelihood of conflict and the observation of joint democracy tend to cluster regionally. This article tests the argument that these clusters can be explained by regional variations in the stability of international borders using a new dataset of territorial dispute hot spots from 1960–1998. These hot spots identify spatial and temporal correlations in the territorial dispute data and therefore serve as close proxies for regional or neighbourhood instability. The addition of these hot spots also eliminates a common form of omitted variable bias – the spatial clustering of conflict – in international conflict models. These results confirm that joint democracy is only statistically significant as a predictor of fatal militarized interstate disputes in more peaceful neighbourhoods once territorial hot spots are jointly estimated. The interaction between joint democracy and regional instability confirms that the effects of regime type on continued conflict apply mostly to dyads in peaceful regions.

Do Democracies Engage Less in Coup-Proofing? On the Relationship between Regime Type and Civil-Military Relations1

The existing literature on military effectiveness established the robust claim that democracies are more successful and effective in winning interstate wars. One mechanism that explains this relationship heavily draws upon the underlying effect of regime type on civil—military relations. Still, this relationship has not yet been explored systematically, and rigorous empirical research on this issue remains surprisingly scarce. In order to address this shortcoming, this study investigates the patterns of civil—military relations according to different regime types, that is, democracies and nondemocracies. More specifically, the authors examine whether and how democracies invest in coup-proofing, that is, strategies employed to prevent the military from seizing power. The main argument is derived from a principal-agent logic and claims that coup-proofing is both a relatively less attractive and necessary instrument for democratic principals. By analyzing newly compiled time-series cross-sectional data on states' coup-proofing efforts in 1975–1999, the core hypothesis is tested in a quantitative framework.

Political Freedom, Corruption, Public Institutions, and Economic Growth: A Global Analysis Since the Fall of the Soviet Union

Over the past few decades, the level of globalization and economic interdependence among nations has continued to rise. Given this rise of interdependence among nations one wonders whether or not political regime type has any influence on a country’s economic growth. Do democracies promote higher economic growth than non democracies? Or is regime type an irrelevant factor neither promoting nor hindering economic growth? If the effects of regime type on economic growth are not well understood, how can foreign policy makers seek to promote democracy throughout the world? The relationship between democracy and economic growth has been a hotly debated topic for many decades, but despite a sizable amount of theoretical and empirical literature there still has been contradictory conclusions drawn regarding the impact of democracy on economic growth. In this paper, I explore the arguments concerning the positive and negative effects of political freedom on economic growth. Also, I explore the arguments put forth by some scholars that political freedom itself does not produce economic growth; rather, they argue it is other intervening variables that lead to economic growth. I address this complex relationship through the lens of Twenty-first Century Growth Theory and develop an operational model using a fixed-effects pooled cross-sectional times-series from 1990-2009. I find that political freedom, low levels of corruption, and the presence of quality institutions contribute to economic growth. Also, counter-intuitive to my expectations, I find that economic volatility contributes to economic growth, but in unexpected ways.

Democracies, Territory, and Negotiated Compromises

Multiple studies have confirmed that democracies are more likely than other regime types to resolve their militarized disputes through negotiation and compromise. We argue that these findings have not controlled for the types of disputes that are most likely to involve democracies. States have often resolved their most dangerous disputes, involving territorial issues with neighbors, prior to becoming democratic. Thus, the issues involving democracies are of less salience and are more easily negotiated with compromise. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute data from Correlates of War Project, 1816 to 2001, we confirm this explanation. The pacifying effect of regime type disappears once controls are added for proximity and issue type. We find that territorial issues among contiguous states are among the most difficult issues to resolve, and democracies are unlikely to be involved in these disputes. Our findings are an advancement of the territorial peace argument and present a first step in a re-examination of the broader empirical regularities associated with democratic peace theory.

Compliance with the reporting requirements of human rights conventions

Compliance with the reporting requirements of human rights conventions is the basis for monitoring how, and how well, the states parties to the conventions are working towards the implementation of the norms of the conventions. This article aims to understand why some states comply with reporting requirements and others do not, and why some report on time and others do not. The article is an empirical test of the potential effects of regime type, government effectiveness, level of economic development, and political stability upon compliance with the reporting requirements of the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention Against Torture, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, by states that have ratified those conventions. The period covered is from 1996 to 2006. Results show that government effectiveness is the most important variable affecting state compliance with reporting requirements. Surprisingly, compliance by liberal democracies has significantly declined in the last decade. Furthermore, within the period covered, liberal democracies are also less likely to comply with reporting requirements than are other regime types.

International Crises and the Capitalist Peace

Recent research suggests that free markets and economic development contribute to a reduction in interstate conflict. This “capitalist peace” has been seen alternately to complement or to supplant the more well-known democratic peace effect. Here, we compare the behavior of democracies and capitalist dyads in the context of the Interstate Crisis Behavior (ICB) dataset. The ICB data offers a number of advantages in assessing the conflict decisions of national leaders, rather than the accidents of subordinates or others. In particular, we explore as yet untested implications of each perspective, examining the effect of regime type and economic and interest variables on escalation and crisis intensity. Our findings provide new evidence that free markets, economic development, and similar interests account for the special peace in liberal dyads.

Reexamining the Effect of Democratic Institutions on Inflows of Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries

The effect of regime type on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) remains a matter of controversy. While some studies report a positive influence of democracy on FDI, others show a negative influence. This study reexamines this discrepancy using pooled panel data during the past 20 years and contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, it refines the causal mechanisms underlying the democracy-related arguments of veto players, audience costs, and democratic hindrance with respect to foreign investment. Second, it introduces three accurate measures to capture each of those three causal arguments. Third, it briefly demonstrates how different measurements of the dependent variable can produce statistically spurious results. The empirical results reveal that democratic institutions are, at best, weakly associated with increases in FDI inflows (measured by FDI/GDP ratios). While multiple veto players (and, counterintuitively, democratic hindrance) may be positively associated with increases in FDI, audience costs are not linked to FDI activities. These findings have important policy implications given that developing democratic countries are trying to attract more FDI in order to achieve their economic growth and development targets.

Cantankerous Cooperation: Democracies, Authoritarian Regimes, and the Prisoner's Dilemma

One of the most important debates in the field of international relations is over the effect of regime type on militarized conflict. This debate, however, has rarely extended to how regime type influences other aspects of foreign policy. Using a computer simulated intergroup prisoner's dilemma, we investigate whether democratic decisionmaking groups are more cooperative than authoritarian decisionmaking groups. We argue that differences between cooperation tendencies of groups can be explained by the structure of the decision process. Repeated simulations show that democracies tend to be more consistent in their decisions in comparison to authoritarian groups. Implications for international relations theory and policy are discussed.

Regime Type, Post-Materialism, and International Public Opinion about US Foreign Policy: The Afghan and Iraqi Wars

Previous research (e.g., Horiuchi, Goldsmith, and Inoguchi, 2005) has shown some intriguing patterns of effects of several variables on international public opinion about US foreign policy. But results for the theoretically appealing effects of regime type and post-materialist values have been weak or inconsistent. This paper takes a closer look at the relationship between these two variables and international public opinion about US foreign policy. In particular, international reaction to the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) are examined using two major multinational surveys. The conclusions of previous research are largely reinforced: neither regime type nor post-materialist values appears to robustly influence global opinion on these events. Rather, some central interests, including levels of trade with the US and NATO membership, and key socialized factors, including a Muslim population, experience with terrorism, and the exceptional experiences of two states (Israel, Albania) emerge as the most important factors in the models. There is also a consistent backlash effect of security cooperation with the US outside of NATO. A discussion of these preliminary results points to their theoretical implications and their significance for further investigation into the transnational dynamics of public opinion and foreign policy.

Regime Type, Rights, and Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America: A Brief Comment

Biglaiser and DeRouen (2006)1 have provided a thorough examination of the effects of different types of economic reforms on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Their main finding-that economic reforms were generally unsuccessful in generating inflows of FDI during the time series-will undoubtedly generate further discussion about neoliberalism in Latin America. Although the authors' focus is on economic reform, they also devote considerable attention to the significance of good governance variables, including the effects of political regime type. Biglaiser and DeRouen's (2006) paper adds to a growing number of studies that have produced conflicting findings regarding the effects of regime type and/or rights and liberties on FDI.2 Given the conflicting results in the literature, and the policy significance of the issue, a brief commentary on the question of regime type, rights, and FDI in Latin America (and in other developing areas) is warranted. One problem in the literature is that researchers frequently employ measures of regime type that may not adequately capture crosssectional differences in rights and civil liberties in Latin America. Similar to previous studies, Biglaiser and DeRouen (2006) use the Polity IV data set (Marshall and Jaggers 2002) as a measure of authoritarianism and democracy in recipient countries. The Polity data focus primarily on constraints faced by the executive, the degree of competition and openness in executive recruitment, and political competition in a