Suchergebnisse

Why have so many attempts at democracy in the past half-century failed? Confronting this much discussed question, Jay Ulfelder offers a novel explanation for the coups and rebellions that have toppled fledgling democratic regimes and that continue to threaten many new democracies today. Ulfelder draws on an original dataset of 110 democratic failures spanning 1955–2007 and also presents analytic narratives for six cases (Cyprus, Fiji, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela) to illustrate why some governments survive while others collapse. Focusing on political parties and the military as key players in the "democracy game," he sheds light on the pathways by which new democracies slide all too often from founding elections to polarization and breakdown

Does natural-resource wealth impede transitions to democracy? This article revisits this question with an event history design that differs from the approach used in other recent statistical tests of rentier state theory. The research confirms that autocracy is typically more durable in countries with substantial resource wealth, and the author finds this effect is robust to other measures proposed to explain the dearth of democracy in the Middle East or the Muslim world. Along the way, the author raises concerns about the use of all-countries and all-years samples to test theories of democratization, arguing that this design can obscure important differences in the forces driving stability and change among different types of political regimes.