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

Scholars have paid increasing attention to democratic backsliding, yet efforts to explain this phenomenon remain inchoate. This article seeks to place the study of democratic backsliding on sturdier conceptual, operational, and theoretical foundations. Conceptually, the challenge of backsliding is to define changes that take place within a political regime. Methodologically, the challenge involves measurement of intraregime changes, as alternative coding schemes change the population of units that have experienced democratic backsliding. Theoretical challenges are dual: First, despite a rich and diverse literature, we lack readily available theories to explain backsliding, and second, the theoretical debates that do exist—centered on the causes of democratic transitions, democratic breakdowns, authoritarian resilience, and democratic consolidation—remain unresolved. We consider how these theories might be called into service to explain backsliding. By doing so, the article aims to set the terms of the debate to create a common focal point around which research can coalesce.

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Transitions and Political Stability in Autocracies. The Role of Public Perception

Gilli

Li²

2018

SSRN Journal

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The literature on the functioning of autocracies has not analyzed the consequences of the fact that policies have multiple dimensions and that these dimensions are perceived with di¤erent bias by people. This fact is obviously more striking in autocracies where the public perception of policies'e¤ects might be partially manipulated. We try to …ll the gap. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on the functioning of autocratic regimes. First, we show that, may be counter-intuitively, both the probability of full e¢ cient and full ine¢ cient policies decrease as opacity increases, while the probability of partially e¢ cient policies has the opposite behavior. This implies that the probability of e¢ cient policies on di¤erent policy dimensions diverges as opacity increases, and this provides an explanation for the observed heterogeneity of policies within an autocracy. Second, the expected probability of a coup has a non monotone behavior w.r.t. opacity, so that at intermediate level an increment in opacity might actually increase the likelihood of a selectorate coup. Finally, also the expected probability of a citizens' revolt might have a non monotone behavior w.r.t. opacity, so that the likelihood of a revolt might actually increase as opacity increases. We conclude that the e¤ect of bias in public perception of some policy dimension is non monotone on authoritarian regime stability. These results provide a reason to explain why transition periods are dangerous for a dictator.

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

Cited by 3 publications

References 49 publications

Re-examining thresholds of continuous democracy measures

Re-examining thresholds of continuous democracy measures

Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding

Transitions and Political Stability in Autocracies. The Role of Public Perception

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