Highway Through the Danger Zone: Thresholds of Democratic Survival & Breakdown

• In Event: Protest, Democratization, and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

It has become an established practice in studies of comparative politics to utilize time-series datasets that code countries as democratic or autocratic according to a particular set of criteria. In turn, researchers often use these dummy variables to categorize whether a country was a democracy in a particular year. Yet most scholars would agree that a country that was coded as democratic for a single year before reverting back to authoritarianism was likely not a true or consolidated democracy for that short period. Is there a threshold for which once a regime transitions from a dictatorship to a democracy, it is unlikely to revert back? This article examines the concept of “democratic rootedness” - the ability for a country to successfully resist reversion to autocracy after experiencing a democratic transition. Using survival analysis, we create a new time-series measure of democracy that reports the probability of democratic survival, given a democratic transition. We find that it takes decades for democracies to become “rooted” – i.e. for the probability of democratic breakdown to decrease significantly. Based on these findings, we urge scholars to be cautious of considering extremely short democratic spells as “rooted” democracies – such regimes are significantly likely to revert back to autocracy.

Authors

• Jonathan Kropko

• Benjamin Clay Helms, University of Virginia

• Anne Meng, University of Virginia

• David Leblang, University of Virginia