Class notes and reading summaries for the course "democracies, autocracies, and transitions"
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73220021FY
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
These notes are for the course "democracies, autocracies, and transitions", and they were made in the academic year 2022/2023. The document includes all lecture notes and summaries of all the readings that were assigned throughout the course (except suggested readings). I got an overall grade of 7,...
Dr. a. (armen) hakhverdian and dr. a. (abbey) stee
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democracies
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Introduction (Teorell)
Why do some countries become democracies and others not? Why do some countries remain
more democratic whereas others slide back toward authoritarianism? What lessons can be
learned for international efforts at promoting democracy from comparative democratization
studies?
In this book I address these questions by drawing on evidence from the extraordinary
improvement in the realm of democracy the world has witnessed in the past 35 years.
Starting in the Mediterranean area in 1974, Greece, Portugal and Spain overthrew
dictatorships and installed popularly elected governments. After military juntas came
down in Ecuador and Peru in the late 1970s, democracy swept the Latin American
continent during the 1980s with the establishment of democracy in Bolivia,
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile.
In Asia, the Philippine dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos was toppled, followed by the
inauguration of competitive multiparty elections in South Korea, Nepal, and
Bangladesh.
By this time, the disintegration of single-party rule in the former Soviet bloc was
well under way. Starting in Poland, the one-party regime in 1989 commenced round-
table talks with the opposition movement, which led to elections in June where the
Communists suffered a disastrous defeat.
In the fall of that same year, massive anti-government rallies appeared all across
Eastern Germany, eventually forcing the government to resign and the wall to come
down.
Less than two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen independent
states.
Meanwhile, in Africa south of the Sahara “the wind from the East” started “shaking
the coconut trees”. On the eve of the revolutionary year 1989, Frederick Chiluba
proclaimed: “If the owners of socialism have withdrawn from the one-party system,
who are the Africans to continue with it?”.
Only 10 months later, the one-party system in his country crumbled as Chiluba was
elected president of Zambia in the first free and fair election for decades.
Toward the turn of the millennium, democracy made further significant inroads
around the globe, such as in Croatia and Serbia in Europe, in Mexico, Ghana and
Senegal in the South, and in Taiwan and Indonesia in the East.
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, This change in the establishment of democratic practices around the globe has been
referred to as the “third wave” of democratization, following the first and second
waves culminating after World War I and II, respectively.
Beneath the general trend of democratization, however, the third wave has also been
marred by undercurrents pulling in the opposite direction.
o In Latin America democratic deterioration in the 1990s struck longstanding
democracies such as Colombia and Venezuela. Following a short opening
after the breakup of the Soviet Union, democratic politics in the former
republics eroded quickly in Belarus, and in Russia.
o In Africa, a coup in 1994 ended decades of multiparty competition in Gambia.
o In some years, this authoritarian undercurrent even outweighed the
democratizing trend of the third wave.
o Yet in other countries, (Middle East and in Northern Africa), authoritarian
regimes have been left untarnished by the global wave of democratization.
What forces drove these patterns of regime change and stability within countries across the
globe? Turning to the most prominent theories of democratization in the field, four distinct
answers to these questions suggest themselves.
Modernization theory (Lipset 1959) alleges that democratization in the last three
decades is the upshot of a general trend toward furthered economic development,
deepened industrialization, and educational expansion. With knowledge on these
structural parameters, movements toward and away from democracy should be fairly
easy to predict.
By the account of the “transition paradigm” (Carothers 2002), in contrast, democracy
has been brought about from above through the strategic skills, and at times sheer
luck, of elite actors manoeuvring under profound uncertainty. With idiosyncratic
factors playing such a decisive role, our understanding of the general factors driving
democratization is severely limited.
If instead the “social forces” tradition (Bellin 2000) were to prove correct,
democratization during the third wave has been triggered by mass mobilization from
below, most notably by the working class.
In accordance with the new economic approach to explaining democratization,
however, democratic institutions have been granted by the rich as a concession to the
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, poor. This should have been made possible through weakened fear of redistribution
resulting from eroding economic inequality.
In this book I argue that while each of these approaches to explaining democratization during
the third wave contains a grain of truth, they are incomplete and simply at fault. These novel
findings have been reached by a combination of an improved large-n study design and a
more systematic employment of in-depth case studies.
Starting with the former, using a combination of two predominant democracy indices
I intend to explain variations in democracy over time across 165 countries over the
period 1972–2006. These analyses break new ground on several accounts.
o First, in terms of the range of explanatory variables entered, I outperform most
earlier studies in the field.
o Second, I present some novel findings pertaining to factors hitherto untested
on a global scale.
o Third, I will test whether there is variation in how determinants affect
movements in different directions along the graded democracy scale. In other
words, I separate the effects on movements toward as well as reversals away
from democracy.
o Fourth, I systematically explore the effects as well as the overall predictive
performance of these determinants in both the short-run and long-run
perspective.
o Fifth, I systematically assess intermediary links in the hypothesized chain of
causation connecting each determinant to democratization.
The second methodological innovation of this book is the way it combines statistical
with case study evidence. From Latin America, the Philippines and Nepal in Asia,
Hungary in the post-communist region, Turkey in the Middle East, and South Africa
on the African mainland, I draw on scholarly knowledge on processes of
democratization from all corners of the globe.
Factors driving and not driving the third wave
Drawing on this comprehensive research design, I make several new findings in this study.
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, The predominant approach to testing modernization theory has become the use of
simple proxies such as energy consumption or national income. I instead revive the
tradition initiated by Lipset according to which socioeconomic modernization is a
broad, coherent syndrome underlying several societal processes, such as
industrialization, education, urbanization, and the spread of communications
technology.
Applying this broader measure, I evidence a robust effect which, contrary to recent
claims, even applies within countries over time.
Moreover, I find that the most effective component of the syndrome of modernization
is not education, nor industrialization. It is rather media proliferation. As radios, TVs
and newspapers spread in the population, anti-democratic coups are either deferred or
aborted.
On my interpretation, media proliferation as the most prominent mechanism behind
the modernization effect helps explain its asymmetric nature. As opposed to increased
national income, industrialization or educational expansion, the democracy-promoting
effects of the media cannot materialize under authoritarian conditions.
More specifically, for the media to work as a safeguard of democracy, some freedom
of the press has to be established. What this implies is that the effect of media
proliferation on democratization increases with the level of democracy already
achieved. For this reason, widespread access to media outlets defers backsliding from
these achieved levels rather than triggering movement toward more democracy.
Whereas societal modernization accompanying long-term economic development thus
helps sustain democracy, the effect of short-term growth on the prospects for
democratization is exactly the opposite. Economic upturns help sustain
autocracies, whereas economic crises trigger transitions toward democracy.
Deteriorating economic conditions also help fuel the mobilization of mass protest
against the regime. Only peaceful demonstrations are effective in promoting
democratization, whereas the use of violent means such as rioting proves ineffectual.
Violent opposition is a strategy reserved for marginalized groups that helps
autocracies legitimize its use of repression. Peaceful protest, by contrast, may arouse
larger segments of the population. A successful popular challenge eventually disrupts
the material and other support bases of the regime. Intra-elite divisions are thereby
exacerbated, preparing the scene for a democratic takeover.
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