Failing Sequences of Democratization: Insights from the Domination Method

• In Event: Democratic Breakdown and Erosion: The Role of Political Parties and Elections

Abstract

The question of how democracy develops, or fails to develop, comprises a substantial portion of research in comparative politics. As competitive authoritarian regimes demonstrate, however, political reforms do not necessarily result in a transition to democracy. The observation that liberalization can lead to both democracy and consolidated authoritarianism exemplifies some important challenges in the study of democratization. In what ways do different features of liberalization—such as improvements in the quality of elections, suffrage, and political guarantees—reinforce one another and affect the likelihood of a successful transition to democracy? Drawing on V-Dem’s measure of electoral democracy and its constituent parts, we examine the relationship between components that contribute to the estimate and consider how they change over time. Specifically, we address the extent to which one variable is consistently higher than another, to which we refer as `dominance', and the order in which they reached specific thresholds. Through pairwise comparisons between variables on these two dimensions, we construct `chains' that indicate the way in which different aspects that are associated with democracy changed over the course of episodes of liberalization, and analyze to what extent such dominance patterns are associated with successful democratization and nondemocratic outcomes, respectively. In doing so, we draw on a novel approach that conceives of democratization as an `episode' that comprises both a bounded period of liberalization and the potential for a transition to democracy, thereby allowing us to differentiate between episodes that successfully democratized and those that did not.

Authors

• Laura Maxwell, University of Gothenburg

• Matthew Charles Wilson, University of South Carolina

• Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg