The International Constraints on Regime Changes

1. 1 Thefocusofthisbook Much has been written about the evolution, development, decline, and the p- sistence of democratic institutions. The query for the keywords democracy or democratizationintheSocialScienceCitationIndexyieldedabout3,000articles 1 and books published in the last 50 years. Regarding the fact that the database just covers the leading journals and publishers of the social sciences, one may reasonablyarguethatthetotalnumberofpublicationsdealingwiththeevolution ortheexistenceofdemocracyismuchhigher. Giventhis, pushinganotherbook intothemarketneedssomeplausiblereasoning. In1999, BarbaraGeddesasked "What Do we know about democratization..." and came up with the answer thatthe?ndingsareambiguousandthatthesupposedcausalmechanismsatwork behindtheobservedrelationshipsarenotcon?rmed. Geddes'(1999)conclusion relies on her identi?cation of an interesting and yet unsolved puzzle concerning thedirectionsoftransitions. Shecounts85breakdownsofauthoritarianregimes between1974and1998andidenti?esonly30transitionsthatresultedinsurviving andstabledemocracies. Accordingtohercodingschemeshecounts9democ- cies that were only to last a short period of time before experiencing a reverse transition; 8 transitions that led to regime types characterized as partial regimes rather than pure democracies; 4 polities that descended into warlordism; and 34 regimechangesthatyieldednewformsofauthoritarianism. Insum,themajority of observed transitions between 1974 and 1998 resulted in the creation or re- rangement of authoritarian rule rather than in the establishment of democracy. Althoughavastnumberoftransitionstudiesexist,thispuzzleremainsunsolved. 1 ThedatabasequerywasconductedinAugust2009 14 1 Introduction Itisarguedherethatthisisprimarilyfortworeasons: ?rst,thelargemajorityof therelatedliteraturefocusesontransitionstodemocracyanddisregardsdevel- mentstowardsauthoritarianism. Itfollowsthatthetheoreticaldebateisdominated byapproachesthataimtoexplaindemocratizationbutpaynoattentiontocontrary developments. Second, the majority of quantitative studies utilize dichotomous measures to operationalize democratization, i. e. democratization is measured in terms of transitions and is de?ned as some polity's crossing of threshold levels of a given measure of democracy. This measure thus ignores institutional shifts that do not yield regime changes. As this institutional alterations are included inthemeasures'parametervalueofstability, suchdichotomousmeasuresfailto re?ect the full variance of the observed institutional alterations. This raises the questionwhetherthe?ndingsofthetransitionliteraturearebiasedduetotheuse ofasomewhatarbitrarydistinctionbetweenregimechangeandregimestability.