Suchergebnisse

I present a new empirical approach to the study of democratic consolidation. This approach leads to new insights into the determinants of democratic consolidation that cannot be obtained with existing techniques. I distinguish between democracies that survive because they areconsolidatedand those democracies that arenot consolidatedbut survive because of some favorable circumstances. As a result, I can identify the determinants of two related yet distinct processes: the likelihood that a democracy consolidates, and the timing of authoritarian reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. I find that the level of economic development, type of democratic executive, and type of authoritarian past determine whether a democracy consolidates, but have no effect on the timing of reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. That risk is only associated with economic recessions. I also find that existing studies greatly underestimate the risk of early reversals while simultaneously overestimating the risk of late reversals, and that a large number of existing democracies are in fact consolidated.

This article characterizes how incentives to lie affect international cooperation and the design of cooperation agreements. I study the optimal structure of cooperation agreements in an environment where the costs of cooperation fluctuate over time. Cooperation is complicated by the fact that the costs of cooperation are private information and participants can benefit from lying about them. When the extent of asymmetries of information between the cooperating governments can be measured in terms of the transparency of the political process, democracies face greater contracting opportunities than authoritarian regimes. However, this article shows that even under asymmetries of information, a limited extent of cooperation can be achieved when the design of cooperation agreements recognizes incentives to lie.