Economic Crisis and Regime Transitions From Within

• In Event: Economic Influences on Regime Change

Abstract

In this paper we consider regime change that is brought about, in part or fully, by actors in the incumbent regime (often the leader himself) rather than being a forced transition, be it via military coups d'état or popular revolutions, from actors outside the regime. Thus, we study a set of transitions that encapsulate processes such as guided democratic transitions, intentional change of the regime architecture from one type of autocracy to another, and self-coups. We develop and illustrate an argument highlighting that economic crisis may incentivize leaders to reform the regime “within” due to two different mechanisms. First, crises may create a “window of opportunity” for leaders to change the regime in a direction that they inherently prefer. Democratically elected leaders that use crises to conduct a self-coup, and thus prolong their tenure, is one example. Second, an economic crisis may sometimes also weaken the power resources of the regime and allow for opposition actors to mobilize, threatening the regime with breakdown. In such circumstances, incumbents may prefer to change the regime from within to appease opponents in anticipation of even worse outcomes. In order to test implications from our argument, we leverage a new and comprehensive dataset on the timing and mode of regime change for more than 1900 regimes from about 200 countries, with time series spanning from 1789 to the present. In brief, we find robust support for the notion that economic crisis induce guided transitions overall. The fine-grained nature of the data also allows us to distinguish between self-coups, guided liberalization episodes, and other guided transitions, and we use these distinctions to further test other implications from our argument.

Authors

• Vilde Lunnan Djuve, Aarhus University

• Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo