Industrial Concentration and the Fall of Dictators in Southern, and Central and Eastern Europe, 1950-2000 ; Industrijos koncentracija ir diktatorių žlugimas: Pietų bei Vidurio ir Rytų Europoje, 1950-2000 m

Abstract

The issue of regime change is extremely important in today's politics, as illustrated by recent events in the world. One of the most promising fields in regime studies is the interaction between economic growth and democratization, which is the object of the thesis. Its goal is to propose and test a model that could explain the precise causal mechanism that operates when economic development leads to democratization. The following tasks were set: to analyse the scientific literature debating this issue and see what approaches are best supported theoretically and empirically; to create a model that connects economic and political variables which lead to democratization; to propose a testable hypothesis based on the model; to test the hypothesis by adopting the qualitative process-tracing method and the quantitative survival analysis. The Selectorate theory was used to construct a model, due to the fact that it may embrace the behaviour of both the economic and political actors. On the basis of this theory a game-theoretic model was constructed and a hypothesis proposed, which states that economic growth leads to restructuring of the selectorate and the winning coalition that creates uncertainty and motivates political leaders and their challengers to favour democratic institutions. The hypothesis was tested by applying process-tracing and survival analysis methods. In the former case, three cases (Spanish, Serbian and Belarusian) were analysed, as they were found to be least similar to each other from the entire studied sample. It may be concluded that the proposed model may explain all of these cases with only minor adjustments. In the latter case, the whole European post-1950 sample was analysed. It was found out that alterations in the structure of the economy and the interaction between changes in the industrial sector and the winning coalition/selectorate have statistically significant influence on the survival of dictators. The more there are changes, the more likely is democratization to take place, just as the model predicts. The following conclusions were arrived at: endogenous effect of economic growth on democratization is well grounded; the Selectorate theory is useful in explaining how economic growth impacts democratization; the proposed model is supported by both the qualitative and quantitative analyses. Further research is needed in order to further test the hypothesis and the model. However, for now there both of them are supported empirically.