Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival

Abstract

The breakdown of democracies has long been associated with poor economic performance. This study attempts to determine whether different configurations of democratic institutions can mediate the effects of poor economic performance. Using an original data set that includes all democracies from the period 1919 to 1995, we use continuous-time duration analysis to test hypotheses derived from the literature on democratization. Specifically, we test the interaction of party system and the configuration of legislative and executive power (parliamentarism and presidentialism) with economic performance to explain the likelihood of breakdown. Results suggest that majoritarian variants of democracy are more resistant to economic contraction than pluralist ones. Under conditions of economic growth, pluralist democracies outperform majoritarian ones.We thank the following people for help in compiling the data set:

Keeping the Democratic Façade: Contemporary Autocratization as a Game of Deception

“…The new contributions build on case examples (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), statistics on selected indicators of gradual autocratization -i.e., military coups and electoral fraud (Bermeo 2016), opinion polls (Mounk 2018) or on changes in quantitative measures over a set time period (Diamond 2015. Most existing comparative studies on the causes of autocratization (Svolik 2008, Bernhard et al 2001, Ulfelder and Lustik 2007, Przeworski et al 2000 as well as descriptive overviews (Merkel 2010, Erdmann 2011, Levitsky and Way 2015 are also biased in that they include only cases of complete breakdown of democracies. Such binary approaches not only fail to capture the often protracted, gradual and opaque processes of contemporary regime change (Luedders and Lust 2018), but also exclude important variations: autocratization in democracies that do not (yet?)…”

“…Bernhard et al 2001;Haggard and Kaufmann 2016), we have lacked sufficiently nuanced yet systematic cross-national, times-series data on various aspects of regimes to detail incremental autocratization processes.…”

Multiple Measurements, Elusive Agreement, and Unstable Outcomes in the Study of Regime Change

“…Wahman et al (2013) use the imputed average Polity IV and Freedom in the World (Freedom House 2015) scores to measure political regimes. The authors derive the threshold between democratic and autocratic rule on their indicator empirically by estimating the mean cutoff point of five established democracy indicators (Bernhard et al 2001;Cheibub et al 2010;Boix et al 2013;Freedom House's (2015) measure of "electoral democracy," and Polity IV). This identifies a cut-off point of 7 (out of 10).…”

Sequential Requisites Analysis: A New Method for Analyzing Sequential Relationships in Ordinal Data

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