The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change

Snyder, Richard; Mahoney, James; Roeder, Philip G.; Bratton, Michaël; Walle, Nicholas van de

doi:10.2307/422435

Cited by 64 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…on the relative incidence of near-term instability. In our view, this finding should encourage scholars in this field to redirect their attention from the economic to the institutional foundations of political instability (Snyder and Mahoney 1999).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

Goldstone

Bates

Epstein

et al. 2009

American J Political Sci

639

454

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Examining onsets of political instability in countries worldwide from 1955 to 2003, we develop a model that distinguishes countries that experienced instability from those that remained stable with a two-year lead time and over 80% accuracy. Intriguingly, the model uses few variables and a simple specification. The model is accurate in forecasting the onsets of both violent civil wars and nonviolent democratic reversals, suggesting common factors in both types of change. Whereas regime type is typically measured using linear or binary indicators of democracy/autocracy derived from the 21-point Polity scale, the model uses a nonlinear five-category measure of regime type based on the Polity components. This new measure of regime type emerges as the most powerful predictor of instability onsets, leading us to conclude that political institutions, properly specified, and not economic conditions, demography, or geography, are the most important predictors of the onset of political instability.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

Goldstone

Bates

Epstein

et al. 2009

American J Political Sci

639

454

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As Richard Snyder and James Mahoney put it, several of the insights furnished by Linz and Stepan are "idiosyncratic" and "apply to just one country." 5 Larry Diamond puts forth a more ambitious and wide-ranging attempt at regime classification. 6 Diamond explores "hybrid regimes" that are neither fully democratic nor "politically closed authoritarian."…”

Section: Juan Linz and Alfredmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pathways from Authoritarianism

Hadenius¹,

Teorell²

2007

jod

567

306

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What conditions provide fertile soil for democratic advancement?Are some nations endowed with traits conducive to democratization while others are doomed to a cycle of authoritarianism? These questions have been at the heart of a fifty-year quest to determine the basic preconditions for democracy. Modernization theorists have asserted the primacy of socioeconomic development while others have identified culture and religion, diversity, oil and natural resources, and diffusion effects as factors that might advance or hinder a country's prospects for democratic change. Our understanding of democratization is, however, far from complete.Unlike the majority of past studies, which assume that all nondemocratic nations face similar obstacles to democratization, we explore here institutional requisites for democracy. Are certain authoritarian regimes more likely to break down and, if so, are certain types more likely to democratize? Do the institutional attributes of the authoritarian regime affect a country's prospects for democratic transition?To answer these questions we develop a new typology of authoritarian regimes-based on Barbara Geddes's seminal contribution 1 -covering 191 countries in the world from 1972 to 2003. Our results show that different types of authoritarianism have different propensities for survival and for democratization. Hence an institutional attribute-the

show abstract

“…Or should some other classificatory concept be substituted for both? While it is beyond the scope of this essay to propose and defend a complete alternative theory of regime types, we expect that as comparativists focus directly on the methodological problem of defining regime types and charting their patterns of diffusion across time and space, theoretically satisfying answers to such questions will be more easily attained~Snyder and Mahoney, 1999;Munck, 2001!. If the absence of a theory of regime type can generate conceptual stretching, the absence of a theory of regime diffusion tends to generate a second methodological problem: an insufficient attention to the inevitable interdependence of one's cases~or, as KKV prefer, observations!. Causal inference through the experimental method requires that one's units of observation be wholly independent of one another, which is why the principle of random selection and assignment is so important.…”

Section: Conceptual Stretching and "Galton's Problem"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Regime Type and Diffusion in Comparative Politics Methodology

Hanson

Kopstein

2005

Can J Pol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, several prominent political scientists have argued that quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be seen as united by a single logic of scientific inference. King, Keohane and Verba's seminal book Designing Social Inquiry~1994, hereafter referred to as KKV!, which jumpstarted this debate, emphasized how scholars might transfer many of the methodological tools of statistics to qualitative research, thus infusing small N comparative case study research with the presumably greater rigour of large N quantitative approaches. But the central goal of unifying quantitative and qualitative methodologies has since been embraced by scholars with quite diverse theoretical orientations~Tar-row, 1995;Van Evera, 1997;Munck, 1998;Coppedge, 1999;Laitin, 2003;Brady and Collier, 2004!. Just exactly how this reconciliation of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches should be effected in practice, however, remains highly contentious. Scholars sympathetic to qualitative methods have called into question the "statistical worldview" espoused by KKV, with its underlying assumptions that causation in social life is generally linear and that units of observation can generally be understood as independent and homogeneous for analytic purposes~Ragin, 1997;McKeown, 1999!. This worldview appears to ignore the intrinsic embeddedness of all observable social phenomena in specific geographical and Acknowledgments: *The authors wish to thank

show abstract

The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change

Cited by 64 publications

References 6 publications

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability

Pathways from Authoritarianism

Regime Type and Diffusion in Comparative Politics Methodology

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About