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

The Institutional Order of Liberalization

“…We extend prior case-based and small-N findings by providing a general description of how the liberalization process unfolds, with comparisons across several possible outcomes regardless of the architects' intent. Using a sample of 371 episodes of liberalizing autocracy from 1900 to 2019 (Edgell et al 2020), we employ pairwise domination analysisa method adapted from evolutionary biology (Lindenfors et al 2018;Lindenfors, Krusell and Lindberg 2019) to describe the general order of reforms in twenty-four indicators of democratic institutions and practices from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data (Coppedge et al 2020). This independent pursuit of descriptionwhile uncommon in our disciplineallows us to avoid potential biases in the quality and quantity of our descriptive inferences (Gerring 2012).…”