The Pacific Legacies of Democracy and Dictatorship: How Prior Experiences with Democracy and Dictatorship Affect Domestic Political Contention: Evidence from Latin America

• In Event: Political and institutional reforms in Post-Authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries

Abstract

Does democracy pacify domestic political conflict? The received wisdom among scholars and policymakers generally contends that it does, maintaining that democracy, as opposed to dictatorship, diminishes the risk of large-scale political violence. This study explores its antithesis, and contends that democracy's causal impact upon domestic political contention is not necessarily pacific, and that dictatorship yields several political outcomes that are conducive to domestic peace. It does so by treating democracy not primarily as a “level” concept reflecting contemporaneous levels of democracy, but as a “stock” concept that represents the historically accumulated stock of democratic experiences. This “stock of democracy” imperils domestic peace in several ways. First, by augmenting the coercive capacity and radicalism of non-state political actors, and through their effects upon perceptions of political empowerment among ordinary citizens, prior democratic experiences spur the emergence, lethality and mobilization of coercive mass movements of resistance, referred to as “political campaigns”. Second, by radicalizing governments, the stock of democracy enhances the scope and severity of state-led efforts to repress such challenges. The causal impact of the “stock of dictatorship” mirrors these legacies. I estimate these effects by drawing upon several global datasets, and unpack the underlying mechanisms through an empirical focus upon twenty post-war Latin American countries. My empirical contributions also come in the form of modeling strategies that address several inferential problems that existing research on the topic has left unresolved, including misspecified, underspecified, tautological and endogenous causal relationships.

Author

• Wynand Kastart, Indiana University Bloomington