Democratic Transitions: Exploring the Structural Sources of the Fourth Wave 9781626373303

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DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS

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DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS Exploring the Structural Sources of the Fourth Wave

Renske Doorenspleet

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2005 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2005 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doorenspleet, Renske, 1973– Democratic transitions : exploring the structural sources of the fourth wave / by Renske Doorenspleet. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-306-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Democratization. 2. Democracy. I. Title. JC423.D6753 2005 321.8—dc22 2004026065 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments

vii xi

1 Introduction

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2 Defining and Measuring Democracy

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3 Describing the Waves

37

4 The Theoretical Approaches

53

5 Development

87

6 Dependency and the World-System

113

7 Class Structure

131

8 Democratic Diffusion

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9 Conclusion

163

Appendixes 1: The Requirements of Competition and Inclusiveness, 1800–2001 2: Political Regime Changes, 1800–2001 3: Hypotheses and Results

173 177 181

References Index About the Book

185 197 203

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Tables and Figures

Tables

2.1 3.1 4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9

Requirements of Political Regimes Regime Transitions per Wave Overview of Different Theoretical Approaches of Democratization Economic Development by Regime, 1990 Economic Development and Democracy, 1990 Economic Development and Democracy, Yearly Results, 1976–2000 Results of Chow Tests Economic Development and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 Factor Analysis of Dependency, 1989 Association of World-System Role and Political System, 1990 World-System Role and Democracy, 1990 Logistic Regression of World-System Role and Nondemocratic or Democratic Regimes, 1990 Logistic Regression of World-System Role, Development, and Nondemocratic or Democratic Regimes, 1990 Linear Regression of World-System Role and Development, 1990 Association of World-System Role and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave World-System Role and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave Dependency and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave

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17 45 79 94 95 101 102 106 120 122 122 123 124 124 125 126 127

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Tables and Figures

6.10 Linear Regression of Dependency and Development During the Fourth Wave 7.1 Middle Class (I) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 7.2 Middle Class (II) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 7.3 Working Class (I) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 7.4 Working Class (II) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 8.1 Elements of Democratic Diffusion 8.2 Neighboring Diffusion (I) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 8.3 Neighboring Diffusion (II) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 8.4 Neighboring Diffusion (III) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 8.5 Neighboring Diffusion (IV) and Transition to Democracy, 1989–2000 8.6 Diplomatic Diffusion (I) and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave 8.7 Diplomatic Diffusion (II) and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave 8.8 Neighboring Diffusion (II), Diplomatic Diffusion (I), and Transition to Democracy During the Fourth Wave 9.1 Bivariate Effects on Democratic Transitions During the Fourth Wave 9.2 Multivariate Effects on Transitions to Democracy

128 139 139 140 140 148 154 156 156 157 158 158 159 166 167

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 5.1 5.2

Percentage of Competitive Systems Percentage of Democracies Number of Transitions to Minimal Democracy Number of Weighted Transitions to Minimal Democracy Transitions to Democracies During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001 Political Regimes That Remained Nondemocratic During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001 Transitions Back to Nondemocratic Regimes During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001 Explaining Transitions to Democracy: A Theoretical Model Relationship Between Economic Development and Probability of Democracy, 1990 The Strength of the Relationship Between Economic Development and Democracy over Time

40 41 44 45 51 51 52 81 95 102

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Tables and Figures

6.1 8.1 8.2 8.3

World-System Roles The World in 1975 The World in 1988 The World in 2000

ix 118 151 151 152

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Acknowledgments

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t is nice to have the opportunity to thank my colleagues, friends, and family. It might be a cliché to say that the completion of this research project would not have been possible without many of you, but most clichés are simply true. Without interaction with other scholars, it would be impossible for me to conduct research. Therefore, I am glad that I had the opportunity to study and work abroad where I could talk with experts in the field of democratization. I was fortunate to spend some time at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where the Globalization and Democracy Program provided in many ways the most helpful environment for my work. The informal atmosphere there was wonderful, and the working spirit was superb. In 2002 and 2003, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of Harvard University, where I had the opportunity to discuss and finish the book manuscript. The nucleus of the Belfer Center consists not only of Harvard faculty members and a yearly new interdisciplinary group of research fellows, but also of public-policy practitioners. It is there that I first understood that research should not be conducted in an ivory tower, but with both feet planted on the ground. If political scientists can provide more insight into issues such as conflict and democratization, policymakers can benefit from this knowledge. I greatly enjoyed the interaction and discussions with fellows of both the International Security Program and the WPF Program on Intrastate Conflict. In addition, I would like to thank my Dutch colleagues—especially Wil Hout (Institute of Social Studies, The Hague) and Peter Mair (Leiden University)—for commenting on parts of the book. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Foundation of Law and Public Administration (Reob), part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which sponsored this research project.

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Acknowledgments

Science is the art of asking questions. Martin, however, prevented me from asking too many questions and encouraged me to just enjoy life. When my fingernails became too short, he kidnapped me to solitary places to go hiking. He was generous with his patience and never doubted that this research would be finished. I have greatly benefited from our thought experiments and his everlasting support during the writing process. —R.D.

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1 Introduction

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he fall of the Berlin Wall was a dramatic moment in history. On 23 August 1989, Hungary opened the iron curtain to Austria, and in September more than 13,000 East Germans escaped via Hungary within three days. It was the first mass exodus of East Germans after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Mass demonstrations against the government and the system in East Germany began at the end of September and lasted until November. Erich Honecker, East Germany’s head of state, had to resign on 18 October 1989, and the new government prepared a new law to lift the travel restrictions for East German citizens. At 6:53 P.M. on 9 November, Günther Schabowski, a member of the East German politburo, was asked at a press conference when the new travel law would come into force. He answered, “Well, as far as I can see, . . . straightaway, immediately.” Thousands of East Berliners went to the border crossings. At Bornholmer Strasse the throngs demanded that the border be opened, and at 10:30 P.M. the guards complied. That moment meant the end of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant not only a substantial change for millions of individuals living under the communist regimes but also a fundamental transformation of the international system. The political shock ended the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and many of the conflicts in the developing world that were fueled by this rivalry. In the post–Cold War setting, however, new conflicts erupted, some of which were extremely bloody and cost countless lives. The end of the Cold War provided also a “window of opportunity” for regime change. After the Cold War, the movement toward democracy has been a global one. This rapid political transformation began in Eastern Europe, spread to Latin America and parts of Asia, and then moved to parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The recent democratization wave has not only been more global and affected more countries than earlier waves did, but there have—at least so far—also been fewer regressions to nondemocratic 1

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Democratic Transitions

regimes than in the past. One can really speak about an impressive wave of democratization, during which many nondemocratic regimes made a transition to democracy. Nevertheless, many regimes have remained nondemocratic. The democratic wave did not engulf China, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, Zimbabwe, and many other states. Hence, although democracy is now spreading to more and more corners of the globe, contrasts still remain: some nondemocratic regimes have made a transition toward a democratic political system whereas others have not. This global transformation after 1989 raises some big questions. Why have some nondemocratic regimes made a transition toward a democratic political system and others have not? How can these recent transitions to democracy be explained? Why did some countries complete a democratic transition, while others could not sustain more than limited political reform and remained nondemocratic? This book provides theoretical explanations for these variations in the transitions toward democracy since 1989 that are applicable to all countries. Each explanation is then tested by empirical evidence.

Actor-oriented Versus Structural Approaches

In general, the literature on democratic transitions has focused on political processes and choices of actors in explaining regime change, thereby failing to investigate whether structural factors affect the recent rise of transitions to democracy (cf. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Di Palma 1990; Przeworski 1991; Karl 1991; Mainwaring et al. 1992; see also Rustow 1970). This actor-oriented approach argues that regime transitions are not determined by structural factors but are shaped by what principal political actors do, as well as by when and how they act.1 Democracy is produced by human beings, especially by the strategies and choices of individual leaders. For example, Spain’s transition to democracy illustrated the role political actors may come to play in transitions “where outcomes are indeterminate and available paradigms do not help” (Di Palma 1990: 8). According to the actor approach, previous structural approaches suffered from blind spots, because they were inadequately prepared for the intervening role of political actors; inadequately prepared to perceive the extent to which innovative political action can contribute to democratic evolution; inadequately prepared, in sum, to entertain and give account of the notion that democracies can be made (or unmade) in the act of making them. (Di Palma 1990: 8)

In Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986) abandoned their earlier structuralist perspective

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and began to focus on elites. They emphasized the “structuralist indeterminacy” of the transitions to democracy and argued that elite dispositions, calculations, and pacts largely determine whether an opening to democracy will occur at all. They pointed out that the catalyst in this transformation from authoritarian rule to democracy comes first from gestures by exemplary individuals “who begin testing the boundaries of behavior initially imposed by the incumbent regime” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 49). The behavior and choices of individual decisionmakers must be analyzed in the first place, according to this approach. Moreover, democratization is ultimately a matter of political “crafting,” which has four aspects that influence the success of transitions: (1) the particular democratic rules and institutions that are chosen among the many available; (2) the mode of decisionmaking that leads to the selection of rules and institutions (pacts and negotiations versus unilateral action); (3) the type of “craftsmen” involved (the alliances and coalitions forged in the transition); and (4) the timing imposed on the various tasks and stages of transition (Di Palma 1990: 8–9; cf. Linz and Stepan 1978; Karl 1991: 172). Most attention has been given to the second and third aspects. When liberalization seems to deepen and to push toward a regime transition, various political actors begin to play an important role. The political actors within the nondemocratic government are the “hardliners,” who are firmly committed to maintaining nondemocratic rule, and the “softliners,” who are willing to negotiate with the opposition about liberalization or democratization. Within the opposition, the possible actors are the “moderates,” who are in favor of democratization while respecting the position of traditional elites and the military, and the “radicals,” who demand democracy and are unwilling to compromise with the nondemocratic government (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Przeworski 1991: 67–68). Certain choices, strategies of these actors and alliances, and links between them are beneficial to the transition to democracy, but others are not. Comparative evidence suggests that transitions to democracy are more successful if there is cooperation (that is, a coalition) between softliners and moderates, with the radicals kept out.2 Adam Przeworski translated the series of choices and possible alliances outlined in O’Donnell and Schmitter’s 1986 book into game theoretical language. The strategies were dictated by cost-benefit calculations of both the opposition (in the Przeworski study, consisting of radicals and reformers) and the regime actors (in the Przeworski study, consisting of hardliners and moderates).3 If the expected benefits for the opposition (that is, more freedom and more political participation) are higher than the risks (that is, imprisonment and danger to life), then the opposition will continue to press for change. When a nondemocratic regime breaks down, the central question is whether the relevant political forces will accept contestation.4

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Przeworski emphasized that there is a dilemma: to bring about democracy, democratic forces must unite against the nondemocratic regime, but to be victorious under democracy, they must compete with one another. Hence, the struggle for democracy always takes place on two fronts: against the nondemocratic regime for democracy and against one’s allies for the best place under democracy. The outcome of the transition process is dependent on the alliances between the political actors. If reformers ally with hardliners and moderates with radicals, two opposing coalitions are formed and they fight it out; and it is then likely that the nondemocratic regime survives in its old form. If reformers ally with moderates and moderates with reformers, the outcome is democracy with guarantees. When moderates ally with radicals and reformers with moderates, reformers are accepting the democracy without guarantees that result from the radical-moderate coalition. When reformers ally with hardliners and moderates with the reformers, the moderates are accepting liberalization, that is, the nondemocratic regime holds, with some concessions (Przeworski 1991: 66–71). The actor-oriented approach tends to be biased toward an incremental process of transition through elite actions, and it argues that the democratization process is dominated by political elites while mass mobilization plays an unimportant role. Some authors simply ignored and did not study the possible influence of the mass, while others considered its role as nonexistent (during the transition) or negative (during the consolidation of democracy). Terry Karl, for example, argued that the most frequently encountered types of transition and the ones which have most often resulted in implantation of a political transition are “transitions from above,” or elite-ascendant transitions. Here traditional rulers remain in control, even if pressured from below, and successfully use strategies of compromise (pact) or force (imposition) or some mix of the two to retain at least part of their power. (Karl 1991: 173)

The probability of a consolidated democratic regime is considered to be limited if there has been too much pressure from below and if mass mobilization has taken place. Karl concluded from the analyses that “no stable political democracy has resulted from regime transitions in which mass actors have gained control, even momentarily, over traditional ruling classes” (Karl 1991: 173). Other studies led to a more nuanced understanding. Scott Mainwaring, for example, stated that “exclusive attention to internal tensions [within the regime] can lead to neglection of the impact of opposition actors. . . . Many transitions involve complex interactions between regime and opposition forces from an early stage” (Mainwaring et al. 1992: 299). He argued that

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elite and mass-driven explanations should not be posed against each other, but that the varying linkages between elites and masses should be studied. Also, Nancy Bermeo argued in her working paper, “The Power of the People,” that it seems democratization is usually engineered if not dominated by traditional political elites, but “recognizing the importance of elite bargaining and pacts still leaves the role of non-elites unspecified” (Bermeo 1997: 7). Moreover, the timing and nature of popular opposition are important to explain why the divisions within a regime emerge, between hardliners and softliners, and how and when these divisions become politically relevant (Bermeo 1997: 8). The historical case studies of Argentina, Chile, Spain, Peru, the Philippines, and Korea show that the people and civil society play an important role in forcing regimes to liberalize and in expanding divisions within the ruling elite. Not only are elite actions and dispositions important, but also mass mobilization and the role of civil society are crucial during the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. As O’Donnell and Schmitter explain it: Once something has happened—once the softliners have prevailed over the hardliners, begun to extend guarantees for individuals and some rights of contestation, and started to negotiate with selected regime opponents— a generalized mobilization is likely to occur, which we choose to describe as the “resurrection of civil society.” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 48)

Civil society is a sphere of action that is independent of the state and is capable (because of its autonomy) of stimulating resistance to a nondemocratic regime. For example, the collapse of communism in Poland was considered as “the revolt of civil society against the state”: the trade union Solidarity demanded social and economic reforms in the beginning, in order to defend the interests of its members. Gradually, the trade union began to act politically by demanding a republic on the basis of self-government. According to researchers, the existence of Polish civil society could no longer be ignored, and its power would explain why Poland eventually adopted a democratic regime (see Casier 1992; Ehrenberg 1999: 173–198). The role of civil society is described not only in the literature on the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe but also in the studies on democratization in Latin America and Africa. For example, Patrick Chabal portrayed civil society in Africa in pluralistic and oppositional terms by defining the concept as “a vast ensemble of constantly changing groups and individuals [who have] acquired some consciousness of their externality and opposition to the state” (Chabal 1986: 15). In a wide area of sub-Saharan Africa, the initial impetus for democratic change also seems to have derived from several actors in civil society such as trade unions,

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human rights organizations, journalists, and informational networks (see Lewis 1992; Bratton 1994; Gyimah-Boadi 1996). Civil society seems to promote democratic transition in several ways. First, it provides a basis for the overthrow of the nondemocratic state. A growing civil society can alter the balance of power between the state and society in favor of the latter. Civil society organizations are ready to exploit any divisions that emerge in the state elite and to expand any political opening. Gradually, social forces gain the ability to weaken the power of the state (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 19–48; Collier and Mahoney 1997). Second, civil society structures multiple channels, beyond the political party, for articulating, aggregating, and representing interests. A vigorous civil society disseminates information widely and thus empowers citizens in the collective pursuit and defense of their interests and values. In addition, civil society supplements the role of political parties in stimulating political participation, thus increasing the political efficacy and skill of democratic citizens. Civil society organizations also recruit and train new political leaders. Third, civil society organizations can provide the citizens with new information about the nondemocratic regime, which may impel and stimulate popular protests. Finally, the capacity of civil society organizations to mobilize thousands of citizens is crucial in producing a transition to democracy. For example, if Philippine civil society had not been organized through the umbrella organization NAMFREL, the mobilization of and protests by an enormous number of citizens that led to the collapse of the Marcos regime in 1986 would never have been possible (see Diamond 1999: 235). In short, civil society may generate a democratic transition by altering the balance of power between society and state, by organizing opposition against the state, by mobilizing the citizens of the state in opposition against the present nondemocratic regime, by articulating interests of groups in society, by recruiting new leaders who are prepared to overthrow the nondemocratic regime, and by providing information, which may inspire citizens to protest against the regime. According to actor-oriented theorists, regime transitions are not determined by structural factors but are shaped by what principal political actors do—whether they are part of the previous regime, opposition, or civil society—as well as by when and how they act. Democratization is ultimately a matter of political crafting. It seems that democracy can be crafted and promoted in all sorts of places, even in culturally and structurally unfavorable circumstances. The pessimism of previous analyses of (structural) preconditions to democracy is rejected, and it is assumed that democratic politics is not merely a “superstructure” that grows out of socioeconomic and cultural bases but has an independent life of its own. As Doh Shin expressed it well, democracy “is no longer treated as a particularly rare and delicate

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plant that cannot be transplanted in alien soil; it is treated as a product that can be manufactured wherever there is democratic craftsmanship and the proper zeitgeist” (Shin 1994: 141). When it comes to explaining transitions to democracy, the actor approach is dominant. Karen Remmer has already noticed that researchers “have all but abandoned efforts to generalize about the macrosocial prerequisites for political democracy in favor of more contingent understandings emphasizing for the strategic choices of political actors” (1996: 630). There are, however, various reasons why the actor-oriented approach, taken by itself, cannot offer a satisfactory explanation of transitions to democracy. In the first place, the explanatory power is limited. If political actors are considered to be unconstrained in their choices, then any political outcome is as likely as any other. Processes of transitions are uncertain, and outcomes are difficult or even impossible to predict, according to this approach (see, e.g., O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). Hence, this actor-oriented approach lacks an important element to be considered a theory, namely, reality cannot be simplified or summarized. Moreover, the actor-oriented approach cannot demonstrate why certain elites make a pact with others and why political leaders develop preferences in favor of democracy. This problem is solved by making ad hoc assumptions about changing external or structural conditions, which in my opinion is not very convincing. 5 In a critical review, Herbert Kitschelt showed that the actor-oriented approach comes much closer to macrostructural analysis than expected; he criticized Przeworski’s actor-centered explanation of democratization, arguing that this approach provides only an intriguing psychological description of the possible frames of mind in which the various actors find themselves, yet whenever Przeworski attempts to explain actor’s strategies and cognitive frameworks, his investigation is compelled to resort to structural and normative constraints. Moreover, Przeworski’s analysis does not get us any closer to accounting for the timing of democratic transitions than macro-historical analysis. It emphasizes process and rationality on the descriptive level, yet structure and psychology on the explanatory level. (Kitschelt 1993: 424)

Ironically, the actor-oriented approach can gain analytic strength “only when placed on some kind of structural scaffolding that imparts a motif to political action” (Bratton and Van de Walle 1997: 26). Actions of and pacts among elites are means toward a transition to democracy, but whether they emerge or hold is linked to probabilities associated with the presence or absence of structural factors. Hence, it is reasonable to unravel the influence of the structural context in the first place, before the influence of actors is examined. It is probable that structural factors provide the foundations for successful democratic transitions. Moreover, an analysis of the

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influence of these structural factors is very important,6 because it has not yet been done in a systematic way in order to explain transitions to democracy during the recent global wave of democratization since 1989.7 In this study, the possible structural sources of democratic transitions are derived from several structural theories, such as modernization theories, dependency and world-system theories, and finally historical structural theories (see Chapter 4).

A Few Methodological Remarks

The choice of the type of comparative method remains an important controversy among researchers of the different approaches of democratization. The goal of comparative social science studies is to produce general explanations of democratization but also to appreciate the complex realities of the cases. There is, however, an important tension between generality and empirical complexity. As Charles Ragin put it firmly: “An appreciation of complexity sacrifices generality; an emphasis on generality encourages a neglect of complexity. It is difficult to have both” (Ragin 1987: 54). The two main types of comparative method differ precisely in relation to this tension: the variable-oriented method focuses on generalized explanations, while the case-oriented method emphasizes the complex reality. In the variable-oriented method, generality is given precedence over complexity. The investigators are more interested in testing propositions derived from general theories than in understanding the specific realities that are relevant to a more narrowly defined set of cases. This method is widespread among modernization theorists who conduct highly abstract, quantitative cross-national studies that are variable oriented and include all or most independent states. In the case-oriented method, a few states are compared or a single state is studied in detail, in order to seek a less generalized explanation of democratization that is based more firmly on specific evidence. The actororiented researchers typically use this method, rejecting systematic macroquantitative or conceptually disciplined qualitative comparisons with all states as units of analysis.8 The actor approach revolves around the descriptive reconstruction of individual cases of regime transitions with little systematic comparison across a wider universe of states (Kitschelt 1992: 1028). Karl, for example, argued that there may be no single precondition for the emergence of democracy, and no single precondition is sufficient to produce such an outcome. Thus “the search for a set of identical conditions that can account for the presence or absence of democratic regimes should probably be abandoned and replaced by more modest efforts to derive a contextual approach to the study of democratization” (Karl 1991: 168).

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Hence, the actor approach strongly emphasizes its power in describing the process of transitions. States that make transitions are often chosen as the units of analysis, and their transition processes are compared with one another. The method employed here will not be case oriented (that is, not aimed at comparing, describing, and understanding only a few states in depth), but variable oriented. The research question in this study focuses on factors that may influence the transition to democracy, and searches for generalizable explanations. Consequently, a comparison using many variables and many states seems the most obvious research method. The units of analysis will be independent states that were nondemocratic in 1989, at the beginning of the period in which an explosive number of countries made a transition to democracy (during the so-called fourth wave of democratization; see Chapter 3). States that remained nondemocratic are compared with those that made a transition to democracy after 1989, in the belief that only through comparative methods can particular causes or conditions be identified that push some regimes to democracy and not others. It is crucial to make a clear distinction between the explanations of transitions to democracy and the consolidation of the democratic regime (Rustow 1970). The different aspects of democratization should be separated. The factors that keep a democracy stable may not be the ones that brought it into existence. While Edward Muller recognized that “the most promising direction for future theory and research on democratization is to pursue the possibility of differential structural causation—that the structural causes of the transitions toward democracy may not be the same as the causes of the stability of democracy” (Muller 1995b: 995), unfortunately not much research on the impact of structural factors on transitions to democracy has been conducted.

Overview of the Book

Before the impact of the structural factors on transitions to democracy can be examined, the first task is to investigate how much variation in political regimes has occurred across different countries over time. How many nondemocratic regimes have undergone a transition toward a democratic political system, and how many nondemocratic countries have kept their systems and changed not at all? Given that patterns of transitions to democracy will vary across time and space, the second question that must be answered is the extent to which this variation in transitions to different political systems can be explained. Several theoretical approaches have been developed in the literature on democratization, focusing on different factors and creating different

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hypotheses to explain democratization. Explanations of the differences in democracy between industrialized countries and the less developed countries were first offered by modernization theories (Lerner 1958; Lipset 1959; Huntington 1984, 1991); by dependency theory (Frank 1969a, 1969b; Amin et al. 1976; Cardoso 1973) and world-system theories (Wallerstein 1979); and by historical structural theories (Moore 1966; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). The theoretical literature and empirical studies of these approaches will be described and reviewed. This study analyzes the different determinants of democratization mentioned by these theories and determines their impact and relative importance across the different countries. A third and final task is to investigate the possibilities of integrating the different factors mentioned by the established theories within a single generalized model. What is the empirical strength of this new combined model, and what are the possibilities of generalization of this integrated theory? Authors have not yet attempted to create a quantitative empirical model on the basis of combining several established theories. Such a model appears to be important, if only because it offers the possibility of drawing more meaningful conclusions concerning the relative influence of factors inherent in the theories. Moreover, a test of a so-called combination model is interesting because such a model may be able to explain democracy better than the separate factors. These are the three crucial research questions around which this book is organized. The central aim is to provide a theoretical explanation for variations in the transitions of political regimes: why some nondemocratic regimes undergo a transition toward a democratic political system while others do not. But what do “nondemocratic regime” and “democracy” mean in this study? What exactly is being explained? This important question is answered in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines and describes how much variation in political regimes and how many transitions toward democracy have occurred across different countries over time. In addition, the units of observation and the period of comparison are described. This chapter also shows that the so-called fourth wave of democratization is a very interesting period to investigate. To answer the central empirical research question in this study, theoretical approaches might be very useful and powerful research tools. They offer sets of ideas, generalizations, and arguments in order to deduce the most important explanatory factors. In Chapter 4, the theoretical approaches on democratization are described and reviewed, and an overview of the different determinants mentioned in all theories is given in the last section. Hence, the fourth chapter passes from the analysis of variance in transitions toward democracy to the actual determinants of this variance.

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In Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8, the main theoretical concepts of the theories (e.g., development, world-system and dependency, class, and democratic diffusion) are defined and operationalized, and the impact of a variety of independent factors mentioned by these theories is assessed. Operationalized indicators are developed and research hypotheses are tested in empirical analyses. Briefly, these chapters focus on explaining transitions to democracy during the fourth wave of democratization. Finally, in Chapter 9, several factors from the different theories are combined within a single generalized model. The influence of the factors is tested by quantitative empirical analyses. It is important to note that the theoretical perspectives presented in Chapter 4 are not mutually contradictory and that testing need not produce a single “winning” theory. Multivariate statistical analyses could show support for multiple hypotheses, even after other explanations are controlled for. The final chapter also summarizes the findings and seeks to develop a new understanding of the variations in transitions toward democracy across countries. The results contradict the idea that structural factors can be ignored when explaining recent transitions to democracy. In particular, geographical diffusion matters. A nondemocratic regime surrounded by democratic neighbors is definitely more likely to make a transition to democracy than a nondemocratic regime surrounded by nondemocratic neighbors. An additional remarkable finding in this study is that some structural factors, such as economic development, had an unexpected impact on democratic transitions since the end of the Cold War. It is still too soon, perhaps, to know certainly whether the period between 1989 and 2001 was an exceptional one in history, with unique opportunities for democratization. The international climate seemed to be perfect and the fall of the Berlin Wall provided a window of opportunity for democratization. It is also too soon to foresee precisely the consequences of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon for democratization processes around the world—or to know whether the world has fundamentally changed. It is clear, though, that this study covers a remarkable episode in history.

Notes 1. In this study, this approach is called the “actor-oriented approach” or the “actor approach.” Different authors have given this approach several names. For example, Kitschelt (1992) called this approach the “process-driven approach,” distinguishing it from the structural approach. Potter (1997), on the other hand, wrote about the “transition approach.” 2. Hence, this approach seems to promote moderation, gradualism, and compromise, because these aspects are the keys for successful transitions to democracy.

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Because of this conservative conclusion, this approach has been criticized (see, e.g., Bermeo 1990). 3. The use of terms here is quite confusing, because O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986) and Przeworski (1991) used different terms for the same concept. According to O’Donnell and Schmitter, the regime actors are hardliners and softliners, while Przeworski talked about hardliners and moderates. The opposition actors were called moderates and radicals in the O’Donnell and Schmitter study and reformers and radicals in the Przeworski study. 4. In this study, attention is paid only to the period after the breakdown of the authoritarian regime. Przeworski also discussed several extended-form game trees to throw light on the period of liberalization, which precedes the breakdown of the authoritarian regime and the period of democratization (Przeworski 1991: 54–66). 5. Guiseppe Di Palma, for example, emphasized pacts and agreement between elites and stated that economic, cultural, and political determinants are not everything when we try to understand regime transitions (Di Palma 1990). However, he did not study these structural circumstances that may influence the possibilities of “crafting” a regime. This is unfortunate, since such a study could strengthen his idea. 6. Mark Gasiorowski and Timothy Power made the same point in their 1998 article and emphasized that analyses of the influence of structural factors on democracy should not be ignored completely. They explored the impact of structural determinants of democratic consolidation in ninety-seven third world countries until 1992. My study, on the other hand, focuses on transition instead of consolidation in all independent countries since 1989. 7. An exception is the study of Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle (1997). Their study, however, is limited to the African continent and focuses on the period from 1990 to 1994. 8. It should be pointed out that other structural theories also prefer the caseoriented method. The radical dependency and world-system theories involve historical, holistic cross-national studies, while the historical-structural and modified dependency approaches focus mainly on a historical qualitative comparison of a limited number of cases (see Chapter 4).

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emocracy is always hot news. Newspapers, periodicals, and politicians are consistently interested in regime changes in the world. They reported that the first direct elections for president in Indonesia on 5 July 2004 showed that this Asian regime is becoming more democratic. They stated that winning the battle against terrorism would be possible only by reforming political institutions in Saudi Arabia. They warned that Senegal was a democracy in theory only and had always been a one-party state in practice until the 2000 elections. They pointed out that Fujimori’s government in Peru had nondemocratic features and wrote about the U.S. desire for regime change to democracy in the Middle East. These pundits seldom clarify, however, what they mean by “democracy” or “nondemocratic regimes.” Since the concept of democracy is so familiar and so frequently used, its meaning has often simply been assumed, and the characteristics of this type of regime remain vague and obscure. In order to study systematically the influences on transitions to democracy, it is necessary, however, to define the concepts of nondemocratic and democratic political regimes. This chapter seeks to clarify the meaning of nondemocratic and democratic regimes, which are the central focus of this book.1 In addition, Chapter 2 provides insight into the possibilities of measuring central concepts such as nondemocratic regime, democracy, and transition to democracy.

Defining the Concepts

When students of democratization attempt to classify regimes, the key distinction is between those that are democratic and those that are not. Determining the meaning of these concepts is not easy. Democracy, for example, is a highly contested concept. T.S. Eliot once wrote that “when a term has become so universally sanctified as ‘democracy’ now is, I begin to 13

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wonder whether it means anything, in meaning too many things” (Eliot 1939: 11–12). There is lack of consensus on the meaning of democracy. Illustrative of this conceptual chaos is that David Collier and Steven Levitsky (1997) identified more than 550 subtypes of democracy in about 150 mostly recent studies. Hence, it must be emphasized that this book adopts a single definition of democracy, one that fits into the Schumpeterian tradition and relies on the ideas of Robert Dahl. Dahl (1971) has developed widely accepted and used criteria for classifying a country as democratic. His procedural definition, based on Joseph Schumpeter (1976), has significantly affected the conceptualizations of democracy in the field of quantitative research on democracy. Dahl regarded a government’s responsiveness to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals, as a key characteristic of democracy. Such responsiveness requires that citizens have opportunities to (1) formulate their preferences; (2) signify their preferences to their fellow citizens and to the government by individual and collective action; and (3) have their preferences weighed equally in the conduct of the government, that is, weighted with no discrimination because of the content or source of the preference (Dahl 1971: 2). These three opportunities, in turn, are dependent on the following institutional guarantees: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The freedom to form and join organizations. The freedom of expression. The right to vote. The eligibility for public office. The right of political leaders to compete for support and for votes. Alternative sources of information. Free and fair elections. The dependence of policymaking institutions in government on votes and other expressions of preference.

Democracies are those political systems in which these eight guarantees are satisfied.2 For practical purposes, a condensed definition that summarizes the basic elements of democracy is more useful. Dahl presented a theoretical scale along which it would be possible to order different political regimes. He stated that, upon closer examination, the eight guarantees can be fruitfully interpreted as constituting two main theoretical dimensions of democratization, that is, competition and inclusive suffrage (Dahl 1971: 4). Focusing on the competition dimension, Dahl explained that regimes have varied in the extent to which the eight guarantees are openly available, publicly employed, and fully guaranteed to some members of the political system. Regimes can vary according to the extent of permissible opposition,

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public contestation, or political competition. Since a regime might permit opposition to a very small proportion of the population, Dahl argued that a second dimension that reflects the right to participate in public contestation, or inclusive suffrage, is needed in order to classify a regime as democratic. On this basis, the following definition of democracy will be used in this research: Democracy is a type of political regime in which (1) there exist institutions and procedures through which citizens can express effective preferences about alternative policies at the national level, and there are institutionalized constraints on the exercise of power by the executive (competition); and (2) there exists inclusive suffrage or the right of participation in selecting national leaders and policies (inclusiveness/participation). As a consequence, Nondemocratic regimes are defined as those political regimes that fail to meet the requirement of competition (1) and/or the requirement of inclusiveness (2). Within the category of nondemocratic regimes, several subtypes can be identified. Nondemocratic regimes that fail to meet the two requirements of competition and inclusiveness are called “closed hegemonies.” On the other side, the two requirements can vary somewhat independently. During the Cold War, communist states such as the USSR had almost no system of competition, although it did have inclusive suffrage. Dahl called such political regimes that meet only the second requirement of inclusiveness “inclusive hegemonies” (Dahl 1971: 5–7). Another type of nondemocratic regime is a political system that does not meet the second requirement, that is, inclusive suffrage in selecting national leaders and policies does not exist. This requirement of inclusiveness demands that most adults living within the territory of the state—regardless of sex, race, language, descent, income, landholdings, education, or religious beliefs—formally have the rights of citizenship to vote and to be elected (see Schmitter 1995: 346–350; Diamond et al. 1995: 6–7). The fact that certain prerequisites are demanded, such as age, sound mind, or absence of criminal record, does not negate this ideal.3 For centuries, restrictions on citizenship have been imposed in competitive systems based on gender, literacy, and income. For example, the political system of Belgium during the nineteenth century could be considered competitive already, but women received the right to vote only in 1948. In

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South Africa, racially restricted suffrage excluded more than two-thirds of the population until 1994. These kinds of political systems that deny suffrage to part of its society are not inclusive and consequently are not democracies but nondemocratic regimes. Dahl called political regimes that do not meet the second requirement of inclusiveness “competitive oligarchies” (Dahl 1971: 5–7). It is surprising that most quantitative studies have considered this type of exclusive regime as democratic. Many studies have taken into account only Dahl’s dimension of competition and ignored the dimension of inclusiveness (Bollen 1980; Bollen 1993; Gastil 1991; Jaggers and Gurr 1995; Alvarez et al. 1996). Kenneth Bollen neglected this dimension, arguing that voter participation is only marginally related to democracy because such participation is a symbol often used in nondemocratic countries. He emphasized that in 1972, Albania, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Romania, and Bulgaria had the highest voter turnout, and he argued that “very few researchers would consider any of these countries as highly democratic” (Bollen 1980: 373n. 3). According to him, the evidence against voter turnout as a measure of political democracy is its low correlation with other indicators of democracy, for example, with the fairness of elections (Bollen 1980: 374). The concept of democracy will be biased, however, or even possibly racist or sexist, if the dimension of inclusiveness is ignored. Bollen (see, e.g., his 1993 article) would consider a regime with extensive opportunities for liberalization, but only to a very small proportion of the society (e.g., white men only), as a democratic one. Although voter participation may be a symbol used in nondemocratic countries and these regimes must not be considered as democratic, this is not a very convincing argument for excluding the dimension of inclusiveness altogether: Dahl considered such regimes as inclusive hegemonies, that is, inclusive regimes without competition. Furthermore, the low correlation between the two dimensions is not sufficient evidence against inclusiveness as an element of democracy; rather this result may demonstrate the independence of the two dimensions (Dahl 1971). It is expected that, particularly in history, this second requirement is more important because, for example, in the nineteenth century several regimes existed in which there was competition but no inclusive suffrage. In contrast, in those states that have only recently experienced a transition to a democratic political regime, suffrage is probably not an issue, because universal suffrage is taken for granted. In Chapter 3, where I examine the variation of political regimes over time, it will become clear that inclusive suffrage is, empirically, a separate dimension that was primarily important before World War II. In this research, regimes without inclusive suffrage (or competitive oligarchies) are not considered to be

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democratic. Moreover, it should be pointed out that voter turnout is indeed not an adequate indicator of inclusiveness, as suggested by Bollen 1980); the section “Measuring the Concepts” below focuses on this matter and presents another measurement. Table 2.1 summarizes how fulfillment of the various requirements leads to the classification of a nondemocratic or democratic regime. Notice that stability is not incorporated in the definitions of “nondemocratic regime” and “democracy.” A political system may be more or less stable, regardless of whether it is democratic or nondemocratic. The Nigerian system was classified as democratic in 1980, as was the Spanish system. However, the Nigerian democracy was not really stable and was ended by a military coup on 31 December 1983, while the Spanish democratic system still exists (cf. the next section). Democratic and nondemocratic regimes may emerge, but they may or may not endure.4 Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the definition of democracy used in this study is a minimalist one. A political regime with competition and inclusiveness can already be considered as democratic. Additional requirements such as socioeconomic equality, security, and full guarantees of civil liberties need not be present per se in a state in order to classify the political system as a democratic one. The broad categories of nondemocracy and democracy, as developed above, provide a basis for understanding how transition to democracy can be defined. A transition to democracy is a transition of a nondemocratic toward a democratic political regime (Schedler 1998a, 1998b). This book focuses on such transitions. Should there be crises, however, the result of regime change need not be democracy. Reverse transitions are not the subjects here; however, even if dictatorships succeed one another, the type of political regime, in my definition, remains the same. When, for example, General Viola overthrows General Videla, the political regime is classified as nondemocratic throughout the entire period, rather than as the “Videla” and “Viola” regimes (see Przeworski et al. 2000). The process of democratization does not end with a transition from a nondemocratic to a democratic regime. Hence, there can be no “end of his-

Table 2.1

Requirements of Political Regimes

Nondemocratic regime (closed hegemony) Nondemocratic regime (competitive oligarchy) Nondemocratic regime (inclusive hegemony) Democracy (polyarchy)

Competition

Inclusiveness

– + – +

– – + +

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tory,” as Francis Fukuyama (1992) suggested, and there is still plenty of room for further development of democracy. Democracy can be deepened to a democratic regime that not only fosters competition and inclusiveness, but in which no major violations of civil liberties occur. Recent researchers have discovered an increasing number of democratic regimes with inclusive suffrage and competition but no civil liberties (e.g., Zakaria 1997; Schedler 1998a; Diamond 1999).5 In such democracies, certain parts of society are sealed off from the democratic process in practice by not guaranteeing certain basic civil liberties. This oppression is most likely to be directed against minority ethnic groups and those groups who contest central authority. For example, the combination of repression and a political system with competition and inclusiveness is prevalent in the Kurdish areas of southeastern Turkey. Although in February 1991, the ban on speaking Kurdish in public was lifted and Kurdish-language publications began to appear, the Turkish military intensified its repressive actions against the Kurdish population and terrorists. A similar situation existed in Mali. After a military coup to depose the dictator Moussa Traoré, constitutional change and multiparty elections followed in spring 1992. Despite this successful transition to democracy and the existence of a lively free press, Mali did not immediately develop into a liberal democracy, because of severe violence against the Tuareg population. Throughout 1993 and 1994, fighting between Tuareg rebels, who call for an independent state in the north, and government forces continued. About two hundred thousand refugees were sheltered in camps in neighboring countries. In March 1996, successful negotiations and agreements were reached and the parties sealed the peace by burning all arms. More recently, many critical radio stations have sprung up, and Mali can now be considered a liberal democracy. Many new democracies, however, have not yet developed from a “minimal” type of democracy with competition and inclusiveness into a “liberal” democracy that guarantees civil liberties. Liberal democracy, in its turn, can be deepened to an advanced type of democracy (see Sorensen 1998). In such an advanced system, democracy is not only a political but also a specific social and economic system. An advanced democracy is an expanded type of liberal democracy: this means further expansion of the three requirements of inclusiveness/participation, competition, and civil liberties. Participation occurs not only through periodic popular elections (Dahl 1971), but also by extensive and active engagement of citizens in the self-governing process (Pateman 1970; Mouffe 1992); it means government not just for, but by and of the people. In an advanced democracy, people literally rule themselves, day in and day out, at school, the workplace, at home, and in all matters that affect them in their common lives. Participation in local community institutions and selfmanagement of enterprises are an ideal. So participation not only concerns

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political institutions, it is extended additionally to social institutions and the economy. 6 The requirements of competition and liberties are also extended in a more substantial manner and to the economic sphere. In an advanced democracy, citizens are assured of equal rights and the state prevents extreme material poverty and socioeconomic inequalities. When participation, competition, and liberties are substantially expanded, a liberal democracy has deepened into an advanced democracy (see O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 11–14; Sorensen 1998: 15–16).7 This research does not go beyond transitions to democracy. The development of a democratic regime with competition and inclusiveness into a liberal democracy, the deepening of liberal democracy to advanced democracy, and the organization of liberal democracy are not the themes of this book for several reasons. One is that those processes have more to do with the concept of consolidation instead of transition. Andreas Schedler tried to order the multiple usages and meanings of “democratic consolidation” (1998a, 1998b). In his opinion, deepening liberal democracy and pushing it closer to advanced democracy represent one of the variants of democratic consolidation. In addition, the development of a liberal democracy is one type of democratic consolidation, according to Schedler. Because processes of transitions need theories and explanations other than those for processes of consolidation, and since the subject of this book is transitions, developments of liberal and advanced democracy will not be included.8 In addition, the processes of liberal and advanced democracies are not discussed for a purely practical reason: very few, if indeed any, empirical cases of such a democracy can be found. As Terry Karl reiterated when she discussed advanced democracies: “Approaches that stipulate socioeconomic advances for the majority of the population and active involvement by subordinate classes united in autonomous popular organization as defining conditions intrinsic to democracy are hard-pressed to find ‘actual’ democratic regimes to study” (Karl 1991: 164). Advanced democracy is a desirable ideal but cannot be reached in reality. Schedler used the metaphor of the horizon and the hiker: a horizon can never be reached because it recedes before the hiker (1998a: 105n. 6). There is finally an analytical reason for excluding advanced democracies. When democracy is studied in a narrow sense as a political system, it is easier to ask questions about relationships between this political system, on the one hand, and economic and social dimensions, on the other (Sorensen 1998: 11). If the political, economic, and social dimensions are confounded, the hypothetical relationship between economic and social influences and political regimes is impossible, because this issue is assumed away by the very broad definition of regime type (see Karl 1991: 164). As Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset stated: “Unless the economic and social dimensions are kept conceptually distinct

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from the political, there is no way to analyze how variation on the political dimension is related to variation on the other dimensions” (Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1995: 6).9 Another essential remark is that this study does use a dichotomous classification of democracy, rather than a continuous scale. Whether scholars should treat the distinction between democracy and nondemocracy as a dichotomy or in terms of graduations has been much debated (e.g., Sartori 1987; Bollen and Jackman 1989; Alvarez et al. 1996; Collier and Adcock 1999; Przeworski et al. 2000). Giovanni Sartori (1987), Mike Alvarez et al. (1996), and Adam Przeworski et al. (2000) strongly justified their choice to treat democracy as a dichotomous concept. Bollen, on the other hand, defended the use of a continuous measurement of democracy. He developed a continuous scale to compare all political systems in terms of their degree of democracy (Bollen 1980, 1991, 1993), arguing: Democracy is always a matter of degree. . . . we do not find useful Muller’s classification of Mexico, Portugal, and Spain as [equally] undemocratic in the 1960s. . . . Mexico demonstrated more competition, more inclusiveness, and fewer restrictions on information than did either Portugal or Spain at the same time. The dichotomous approach dismisses these differences as inconsequential. (Bollen and Jackman 1989: 618)

Bollen argued further: For instance, the fairness of elections is a matter of degree. Is a country with widespread fraud the same as one with minor irregularities? Even ignoring the questionable practice of restricting the franchise criterion only to men, suffrage is a continuous variable. Is there no difference in the degree of political democracy if 95 per cent of men are eligible in one country versus 20 per cent in another? (Bollen 1991: 9)

In Bollen’s approach, there is a difference. For him and other authors all political systems are democratic to some degree; there are no entirely nondemocratic regimes in their view (see Bertrand 1981; Arat 1991; Vanhanen 1997). I do not agree with Bollen and Jackman (1989), however, because: “It is one thing to argue that some democracies are more democratic than others and another to argue that democracy is a continuous feature over all regimes, that is, that one can distinguish the degree of ‘democracy’ for any pair of regimes” (Alvarez et al. 1996: 21). While democracy can be more or less developed, a political regime cannot be half-democratic. Hence, my first reason to justify a dichotomous approach is based on normative concerns: although some nondemocratic regimes are more democratic than others, they should not be considered democratic regimes. Not every politi-

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cal regime is democratic to some degree; in this study, I advocate that some minimum requirements (that is, competition and inclusiveness) should be satisfied before a political regime can be labeled a democracy. The second reason to choose a dichotomy is that a nominal classification better serves the purpose of this study; since it focuses on the transitions from a nondemocratic regime to a democratic one, a discrete classification is needed. This study calls for a dichotomous approach that establishes the cut-point or threshold in relation to which the event of a transition to democracy is identified (see Huntington 1991: 11; David Collier and Robert Adcock 1999: 551). As Collier and Adcock have shown, decisions about graduations versus dichotomies are often built into the framing of the research questions; research that focuses on democratization as a well-bounded event, such as a transition to democracy, favors a dichotomous approach to defining democracy (Collier and Adcock 1991: 561–562). A third argument to justify a dichotomous approach is that it is more valid in conceptual terms. Sartori has been a strong defender of this argument. He argued that a distinction between nondemocracy and democracy in graded terms is an analytically “stultifying” exercise in “degreeism,” which misses the fact that political systems are “bounded wholes” (Sartori 1987: 184). Sartori stated that conceptual oppositions (for example, democracy versus nondemocracy, big versus small, dead versus alive) can be “contraries” or “contradictories.” In the case of conceptual oppositions that are contraries, intermediate positions exist; examples are big versus small and rich versus poor. In the case of conceptual oppositions that are contradictories, intermediate positions cannot exist; examples are, according to Sartori, alive versus dead and nondemocracy versus democracy. Sartori argued that contradictories, such as nondemocracy versus democracy, should be treated as a dichotomy. Furthermore, political systems are “bounded wholes,” that is, systems are constituted by multiple attributes, all of which must be present for a case to be classified as representing that type of system. Hence, democratic political systems are constituted by competition and inclusiveness, and a case is only classified as democratic when those attributes are present. Regimes must first be classified as democracies or nondemocracies, and then, only as a second step, can a further set of criteria be applied to determine how democratic democracies are.10 “What makes democracy possible should not be mixed up with what makes democracy more democratic” (Sartori 1987: 156). This study follows Sartori’s approach in first classifying political regimes as nondemocratic and democratic ones, thereby applying a dichotomous approach. The choice of a dichotomy is in fact a choice for what is traditionally considered the lowest level of measurement. This choice appears to under-

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utilize more fine-grained information about differences among regimes. Yet the empirical distribution of cases provides a fourth and final justification for a dichotomous approach. Empirically, there appears to be a gap between democracies and nondemocracies: across cases and over time, cases generally either possess or lack most of the attributes of democracy. Thus, by looking for graduations, it appears that the distribution of cases is “U-shaped”: either political regimes are very undemocratic or they are very democratic. If there is an empirical gap between democracies and nondemocracies, it is justified that a dichotomy is good enough (Collier and Adcock 1999: 554–556). Moreover, as Przeworski and others have argued, if a distribution is U-shaped, then “there is less measurement error when a dichotomous scale is used” (Alvarez et al. 1996: 31; cf. Przeworski et al. 2000). Bollen would criticize such dichotomous classification; he preferred a continuous scale over a dichotomous one, because the cut-point in a dichotomy risks being arbitrary, while dichotomizing “blurs distinctions between borderline cases” (Bollen and Jackman 1989: 612; cf. O’Loughlin et al. 1998). Yet why are there “borderline cases”? Alvarez et al. convincingly argued: “If we cannot classify some cases given our rules, all this means is that we have bad rules and we have insufficient information to apply them. . . . In turn, some random errors with regard to the rules will remain, and we will have to live with them” (1996: 21–22). But errors are errors, and not “borderline cases.” And there are no grounds to think that a finer classification is more precise. Przeworski and others convincingly showed that a finer scale generates smaller errors but more of them, while a rougher scale generates larger errors but fewer of them (Przeworski et al. 2000; Alvarez et al. 1996).

Measuring the Concepts

In the previous section, democracy was defined as a system of government in which competition and inclusiveness exist. Nondemocratic regimes are defined as those political regimes that fail to meet the requirements of competition and/or inclusiveness. Transitions to democracy, the focus of this study, are to be understood here as transitions of a nondemocratic to a democratic political regime. This section pays attention to the two requirements of a democratic system: competition and inclusiveness. Before measuring these requirements, however, it is important to determine whether a country has a functioning political regime or not. The Polity IV data set, which was developed by Ted Gurr and other researchers, can be used: if a country is occupied by foreign powers during wartime, if there is a collapse of central authority, or if there is a period of transition during which new polities and institutions

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are planned, legally constituted, and put into effect, the years are coded as “-66,” “-77,” or “-88” (Gurr et al. 1989). During such periods, such countries have no self-governing political regimes and cannot, as a consequence, be classified as nondemocratic or democratic. In Appendix 2, which is a complete listing of types of political regimes, such cases are coded as “I.” In this section, the political regimes of the rest of the cases can be classified on the basis of the level of competition and inclusiveness. And from the discussion and critique of previous measurements of competition and inclusiveness, a new classification of political regimes will be developed for use here. Measuring the First Requirement of Competition

In this study, a political system meets the requirement of competition when an opposition exists that has some chance of winning office as a consequence of elections (see Przeworski et al. 2000: 16). In a competitive political system, there are thus institutions and procedures through which citizens can express effective preferences about alternative policies and leaders. Political leaders are chosen by competitive and open popular elections, and oppositional activity is not restricted or suppressed. There are many indices and data sets of democracy that include the first requirement of competition. Many of these measures, however, are not useful here. First, in the context of this study, measures of democracy are needed that cover a long period of time. Most measures of democracy are only available for one or two specific years (Bollen 1980; Bertrand 1981; Coppedge and Reinicke 1991; Bollen 1993) or a limited period from 1948 to 1984 (Arat 1991); and from 1950 to 1990 (Alvarez et al. 1996; Przeworski et a1. 2000) or since 1973 (Gastil 1973–2003). Second, some data sets are limited to developing countries (e.g., Arat 1991; Gasiorowski 1996). Third, although Tatu Vanhanen’s index covers annual data from 1850 to 1993 for most independent countries, his indicator of competition cannot be considered a very valid one (Vanhanen 1984, 1990, 1997). Vanhanen measured competition as the smaller parties’ share of the votes cast in national elections; competition was calculated by subtracting the percentage of votes won by the largest party from 100. If one country’s party receives 30 percent of the vote and another 40 percent, the latter is treated as ten percentage points greater in competition than the former. This is, in fact, a crude measure of the degree of concentration in a party system, or the degree of fragmentation, and this clearly tells us little about competition as such. Vanhanen’s indicator does not measure competition or contestation as intended by Dahl (1971) and should not be regarded as a defining requirement of democracy but more as one of its properties, of which there

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can be more or fewer.11 In short, the measures described above are not useful for the present study. Another data set that can be used to measure democracy has been developed by Gurr and his colleagues, who first defined the concept of democracy (1991; cf. Jaggers and Gurr 1995). They argued that there are three essential elements of democracy as it is conceived in the contemporary political culture of Western societies. One is the presence of institutions and procedures through which citizens can express effective preferences about alternative policies and leaders. Second is the existence of institutionalized constraints on the exercise of power by the executive. Third is the guarantee of civil liberties to all citizens in their daily lives and acts of political participation. Other aspects of plural democracy, such as the rule of law, systems of checks and balances, freedom of the press, and so on, are the means to, or specific manifestations of, these general principles. The authors did not code data on the third element, that is, civil liberties, “given the paucity of the current, let alone historical, data on civil liberties” (Jaggers and Gurr 1995: 470). Moreover, they neglected the second requirement of inclusiveness, resulting in the fact that the United States was already classified as a “democracy” by 1810 and Switzerland after 1848. Hence, although Gurr’s definition of democracy contains the dimensions of competition, inclusiveness, and civil liberties, his actual operationalization of democracy is in fact restricted to competition. This study will rely on Gurr’s Polity IV data set, in order to measure competition (Gurr et al. 1989, 1991; Jaggers and Gurr 1995). The fact that Gurr’s data set of democracy is available for most independent countries on an annual basis since 1800 makes it a prime candidate as a source to measure competition.12 Moreover, Gurr’s Polity IV data set employs a definition of competition that accords with the definition used here. Operationalizations of competition are based on judgment codings of the following four indicators (Gurr 1974; Gurr et al. 1989; Gurr et al. 1990; Jaggers and Gurr 1995): 1. Competitiveness of executive recruitment: competitiveness refers to “the extent that prevailing modes of advancement give subordinates equal opportunities to become superordinates” (Gurr 1974: 1483). For example, selection of chief executives through popular elections or by an elected assembly matching two or more viable parties or candidates is regarded as competitive. When chief executives are determined by hereditary succession, designation, or by a combination of both, as in monarchies whose chief executive is chosen by a king or court, the political system is not competitive. 2. Openness of executive recruitment: recruitment of the chief executive is “open” to the extent that all the politically active population has an

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opportunity, in principle, to attain the position through a regularized process. If chief executives are determined by hereditary succession, for example, kings, emperors, beys, emirs, etc., who assume executive powers by right or descent, the system is a closed one. 3. Competitiveness of political participation: the competitiveness of participation refers to the extent to which alternative preferences for policy and leadership can be pursued in the political arena. This scale runs from “suppressed competition,” in which no significant activity is permitted outside the ranks of the regime and ruling party, to “competitive competition,” in which there are relatively stable and enduring political groups that regularly compete for political freedom at the national level. 4. Constraints on chief executives: this variable refers to the extent of institutionalized constraints on the decisionmaking powers of chief executives, whether individuals or collectivities. Any “accountability group” may impose such limitations. In Western democracies these are usually legislatures. Other kinds of accountability groups are the ruling party in a oneparty state; councils or nobles or powerful advisors in monarchies; the military in coup-prone polities; and in many states, a strong, independent judiciary. The concern is therefore with the checks and balances between the various parts of the decisionmaking process (Gurr et al. 1989: 14–16). A clear and explicit choice of the cut-off point is made in this study. Believing that the specification of minimum preconditions results in a more transparent classification, the following measurement is used:13 A competitive system is measured as a political regime in which (1) there is at least one executive chosen by competitive popular elections;14 (2) and the entire politically active population has an opportunity, in principle, to attain an executive position through a regularized process;15 (3) and alternative preferences for policy and leadership can be pursued in the political arena. Oppositional activity is not restricted or suppressed;16 and (4) and finally, there are at least substantial limitations on executive recruitment.17 These four preconditions must all be present in order to consider a political regime a competitive one. If one or more of these four preconditions are absent, a political regime is regarded as a noncompetitive one. On the basis of these decision rules, political regimes can easily be classified as competitive and noncompetitive. Competitive regimes can be found in many corners of the globe. Not only the Americans, Australians, and Germans, but also, for example, the Mongolian people have the right to change their chief executives through democratic processes. Since 1990, Mongolia has experienced multiple

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turnovers of power through democratic mechanisms. While the president is directly elected, the prime minister is nominated by the majority party in the legislature (with approval of the president) and elected by the national legislature (the Great Hural). Both the parliamentary and presidential elections were deemed free and fair by international observers. The states that fulfill the first requirement of competition, with the periods in which they did, are listed in Appendix 1. While these countries all can be considered competitive, their actual type of competitive system may vary greatly. There are parliamentary systems (e.g., in the Netherlands), semipresidential (France), and presidential systems (the United States). There are federal and unitary states and variations in the type of electoral systems (proportional representation or “first past the post” systems). Despite these differences, these cases all have competitive political systems. Measuring the Second Requirement of Inclusiveness

A second fundamental requirement of what I call a democratic regime is the existence of universal suffrage at the national level. The norm of universality requires that all citizens of the state—regardless of their sex, race, language, income, landholdings, education, or religious beliefs—have the right to vote and to be elected. The fact that certain prerequisites are demanded, such as age, sound mind, or absence of criminal record, does not negate this principle. How can this requirement of inclusiveness be measured? This question is less easy to answer than it seems at first sight. It is extremely difficult to develop theoretical criteria for judging when, if ever, exclusion is rightful or inclusion is obligatory. It should be noted that the requirement of inclusiveness assumes the element of citizenship (see Schmitter and Karl 1991: 77). Who belongs to the citizenry? Who has the right of citizenship? Are only male adults considered as citizens, only taxpaying people, or is a large part of the population excluded from citizenship? Who must be included in the “demos” and who may or must be excluded from the demos? These questions spring to mind when one thinks about the inclusiveness of a political system. One solution for deciding who ought to be included in the demos is to assert that the grounds are inherently particularistic and historical and, therefore, there are no general principles. Citizenship is fully contingent on circumstances that cannot be specified in advance. Schumpeter supported such a solution, suggesting that we must “leave it to every populus to define himself” (Schumpeter 1976: 245). He argued that “discrimination can never be entirely absent. . . . It is not relevant whether we, the observers, admit the validity of those reasons or of the practical rules by

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which they are made to exclude portions of the population; all that matters is that the society in question admits it” (Schumpeter 1976: 244). As a result, the exclusion of blacks in the American South, for example, does not mean that the South was undemocratic, according to Schumpeter. To wit, the United States was democratic in relation to its demos, that is, in relation to the white population. Following Dahl (1989), I think that such a system should not be considered democratic. A political system is not democratic in relation to its own demos, but in relation to everyone subject to its rules. Hence, every person that is subordinated to a government and its laws should have an unqualified right to be a member of the demos, and thus to be considered a citizen. There are some exceptions to this categorical right: children, for example, are to be excluded from the demos. In this book, persons older than twenty-one are qualified as adults and hence as members of the demos. Also, transient persons are excluded from the demos. Temporary residents in a country are subject to that country’s laws but are not qualified to participate in government. If the person has lived in a country for decades, on the other hand, exclusion would be less justified. Finally, persons who are mentally defective may be excluded for citizenship on the grounds that they are not competent enough to exercise their citizen rights, such as the right to vote. But in principle, every adult that is subject to a government and its laws must be presumed to be qualified as—and has an unqualified right to be—a member of the demos. It is not only theoretically but also empirically complicated to decide whether a political system is inclusive or not. There are not many empirical studies in this field and consequently not many foregoing examples of classifications to rely on. Most quantitative studies have taken into account only Dahl’s dimension of competition and ignored the dimension of participation or inclusiveness (Bollen 1980, 1993; Gastil 1991; Jaggers and Gurr 1995; Alvarez et al. 1996; see previous section of this chapter). Furthermore, if researchers do pay attention to the dimension of inclusiveness, they use indicators that are not valid. Vanhanen (1984, 1990, 1997) is one of the few authors who stress the importance of the dimensions of both competition and inclusiveness to measure the concept of democracy. Vanhanen’s data set is impressively large: his study contains 172 countries, covering the period 1991–1993; in 1984 he collected data for 119 countries, covering the period 1850–1979; and his 1990 study covers 147 countries in the period 1980–1988. Unfortunately, the percentage of the total population who actually voted in the election concerned is used to measure the degree of electoral inclusiveness. A serious disadvantage of this method of measurement is that “the percentage of the total population that actually voted” does not take into account variations in the age struc-

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tures of the populations. The percentage of the adult population is significantly higher in developed countries than in poor developing countries. According to Table 26 of the World Bank’s World Development Report 1991, the percentage of children (0–14 years) varied from 50.3 percent in Kenya to 15.1 percent in Germany in 1989. Therefore, calculating the degree of electoral inclusiveness on the basis of the total population is not justified. Moreover, voter turnout is not a valid way to measure a structural concept as inclusiveness in national elections. Voter turnout fluctuates too greatly and is often affected by temporal developments, ranging from voter satisfaction or apathy to whether it rains on election day (Bollen 1991: 4). Voter turnout thus reflects factors that have little to do with measuring the right to participate in national elections (inclusiveness), and structural indicators such as institutional guarantees to participate in elections may be better to calculate the second requirement of democracy.18 The only structural data that seem to be collected on inclusiveness for different years were gathered by Zehra Arat (1991). There are other attempts, but these data are collected for only one point in time (Dahl 1971; Coppedge and Reinicke 1991)19 or are either unreliable or difficult to replicate (Huntington 1991).20 Arat measured inclusiveness as the percentage of the population that has the opportunity to select representatives. If any restrictions are employed in a country, the estimated proportion of the population under restriction is subtracted from 1.00. For example, in a country where literacy is required for voting and the illiteracy rate is 40 percent, the score of that country would be 0.60. If suffrage is granted only to men, the score would be approximately 0.50. The range of scores varies between zero (no suffrage) and one (full suffrage), and the annual scores for the thirty-five years range from 1948 through 1982. These data are no longer available, however, and it was therefore necessary to recompile them. In this research, data on universal suffrage were collected in order to measure the second requirement of a democratic political system. The indicator of inclusiveness of the political system has the following four categories or codes (cf. Coppedge and Reinicke 1991): 1. Universal adult suffrage or minor restrictions. 2. Suffrage with partial restrictions (less than 20 percent of the population is excluded). 3. Suffrage denied to large segments of the population (more than 20 percent is excluded). 4. No suffrage. Essentially, every adult that is subject to a government and its laws must be presumed to have the unqualified right both to vote and to be eligible to run

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for public office. If there are restrictions, the requirement of inclusiveness is violated. For example, in Latin American countries such as Chile and Ecuador, literacy requirements continued until the 1970s. Therefore, I have used the following checklist to rank the countries in the four categories of inclusiveness: • Are there restrictions on the basis of gender? Are women excluded? • Are there restrictions on the basis of race? • Are there restrictions on the basis of education? Literacy requirements? • Are there economic restrictions? Income requirements? Landholdings requirements? Poll taxes? • Are there restrictions on the basis of religion? • Are there other restrictions, for example, on the basis of descent? Based on the answers to these questions, the percentage of the population targeted for possible restrictions has been calculated. In this view, there is a difference between whether a regime is violating the voting rights of a small group and a total community. This measurement recognizes the differences between two regimes that utilize a similar type of restriction, but one threatens vast segments of society and the other a small minority (see Stohl et al. 1986: 602–603; Arat 1991: 25). For example, literacy requirements existed in both Ecuador (until 1980) and Chile (until 1970). Yet in Chile the adult literacy rate was 90 percent and in Ecuador 69 percent (World Bank 1978). So, although both countries used the same restriction, in Ecuador a much larger part of the population was disenfranchised. Consequently, Chile falls in the second and Ecuador in the third category of the indicator of inclusiveness. While the restriction in Chile remains reprehensible, it is nevertheless considered less abusive than the same restriction in Ecuador, because fewer individuals are directly affected. To classify a country in one of the four categories of inclusiveness, I carefully examined historical sources for each country and relied on various monographs, Keesing’s Record of World Events, and many handbooks and almanacs (e.g., Rokkan and Meyrat 1969; Cook and Paxton 1975; Delury 1983; Gorvin 1989; Mackie and Rose 1991; Lipset 1995; see also www.ipu.org). In this way it seemed possible to classify the countries. Only countries that passed the first requirement of competition from 1800 to 2000 are considered in measuring the inclusiveness of the system.21 One important decision must be made in addition: when do countries sufficiently fulfill the requirement of inclusiveness? Of course, if a country falls in the first category, then there is no problem. But what if there are partial restrictions? Only two countries appear to fall in the second category, “suffrage with partial restrictions” (less than 20 percent of the popula-

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tion is excluded): Chile excluded 10 percent of the population by literacy requirements until 1970, and in the United States, a variety of devices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and property qualifications, prevented virtually all blacks (10 percent of the population) from voting until 1965.22 It was decided to treat these two cases as exceptional ones and to consider Chile in 1949 and the United States in 1920 as sufficiently inclusive when they granted women the right to vote. In short, in this study, An inclusive political system is measured as a political regime in which there is universal adult suffrage, or there is suffrage with minor or partial restrictions.23 Appendix 1 gives an overview of the years in which competitive systems can be considered inclusive ones. Note that there are significant changes if the dimension of inclusiveness is added as a requirement of democracy: for example, Denmark’s political system has been competitive since 1915 but inclusive only since 1920. The political system of Portugal was competitive during the period 1911–1925, but not inclusive because only males were allowed to vote; in 1975, all citizens age eighteen and over were entitled to vote, the system became competitive, and it can consequently be classified as a democracy. In 1971, Switzerland’s competitive system made a transition to a democracy with woman suffrage. And up to now, in Latvia and Estonia only citizens of prewar Latvia and Estonia have automatically been entitled to citizenship, leaving the almost 40 percent non-Estonian and 50 percent non-Latvian population (that is, Russians) largely disenfranchised (East 1992, 1993). A complete listing of regime changes, part of the socalled minimal democracy data set, is given in Appendix 2. Reliability, Validity, and Final Remarks

Reliability is the extent to which measurements are consistent when repeated by the same observer, or by different observers using the same instrument. The greatest threats to reliability are incompleteness of available information, difficulties in interpreting the data, and subjectivity in coders’ scoring. In the ideal situation a country’s record on competition and inclusiveness would be complete, up-to-date, and readily available. Cross-nationally comparable and longitudinal quantitative data are often scarce or of dubious quality for any area before 1900 (see Goldstein 1986: 613). Gurr and his collaborators were confident that the sources examined prior to coding were not sufficiently complete and accurate and that this was “a potential threat to the reliability and validity of the codings for some minor European

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and Latin American states during the nineteenth century” (Gurr et al. 1989: 9). Thus, these historical data are far less readily available and less reliable than data for the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the information available may also be incomplete for the twentieth century. There are various reasons why not all accessible information is reported: government censorship, personal taste of media editors, and limited publication space all play a role (Bollen 1986: 579–582; 1993). It is possible that a relatively open nation may appear to be lower in competition or inclusiveness simply because violations are more likely to be reported to the outside world (Claude and Jabine 1986: 563). Another filter that affects the information reported internationally is the general media coverage a country receives. For example, because of the strategic interests of the United States, the Philippines’ January 1986 election had wide U.S. exposure, so data on inclusiveness are reported and easily available. On the other hand, Africa received much less attention in the media, and information on inclusiveness in Niger, for example, is difficult to get. Finally, another filter is the degree to which the current situation deviates from the past. In a nation with a history of repression, new incidents of repression are less likely to be reported in the international media. In short, Gurr’s measurement of competition and the measurement of inclusiveness presented in this study rely mostly on international information, which may be incomplete in some cases. These issues have been taken into account as accurately as possible during the process of collecting data of inclusive suffrage. Moreover, to minimize contamination by biases of the sources, multiple sources of information were used to determine the inclusiveness of a country (e.g., Rokkan and Meyrat 1969; Cook and Paxton 1975; Delury 1983; Gorvin 1989; Mackie and Rose 1991; Lipset 1995). Difficulties in interpreting the data may constitute a problem, especially for data on civil liberties (see Stohl et al. 1986; Goldstein 1986: 622– 626). The absence of actual repressive governmental actions at a given point in time may not be a reliable indicator of the absence of human rights violations. In some cases, data suggesting few human rights abuses may actually reflect the success of previous repression or an unmeasurable atmosphere of intimidation. It is difficult to measure the impact of human rights violations that frighten people into not doing what they might have done otherwise. As the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy stated, “What matters is not what the censor does to what I have written, but to what I might have written”; and Albert Einstein, having fled the Nazi regime, noted: If I would be a young man again and I had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest

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degree of independence still available under present circumstances. (quoted in Goldstein 1986: 624–625)

“Objective” statistics cannot capture this atmosphere. Hence, what is needed is not only enough information, but judgment and interpretation of this information as well. At the same time, this judgment may threaten reliability: the subjectivity in coders’ scorings can be a problem. The judgment process is important. How did Gurr and his colleagues move from the available information to the ratings? Gurr provided a brief description of the categories for each of his variables. Based on these descriptions and the information, coders placed a country in one of the ranked positions. The description of each category is not very detailed, but more recently the coders provided examples to illustrate factors that affect a country’s rating. Unfortunately, the scorings are based on information from unspecified sources. As a consequence, it is questionable whether Gurr’s ratings can be replicated (see also Bollen 1986: 584–585; Barsh 1993: 105–107). Although the data collection on the requirement of inclusiveness is a first try, the data can be easily replicated. So the classification of nondemocratic and democratic regimes can easily be repeated by researchers who possess Gurr’s Polity IV data set and my data set of inclusiveness in political regimes.24 In addition to reliability, validity is always difficult to establish. A valid measure is one that exactly measures what it is supposed to. The validity of the classification of “minimal democracies” is, however, one of its stronger points: there is much correspondence between the requirements that Dahl (1971) used to define polyarchy. The classification is well grounded in democratic theory (cf. Coppedge and Reinicke 1991: 56–57). Another advantage of this new classification of political regimes is that the data set is worldwide in scope. The classification of nondemocratic regimes and democracies covers almost all independent countries from 1800 until 2000. Such an extensive data set provides substantial opportunity and possibilities, especially to show and understand variations in political regimes over time. Waves of democratization can now be investigated; the following chapter passes from definitions and measurements toward the analysis of variance in transitions of political regimes.

Notes 1. I realize there are many subtypes of nondemocratic regimes, for example, communist, fascist, and nationalist regimes, one-party systems, totalitarian dictatorships, authoritarian government, and sultanistic regimes (see Arendt 1962;

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Huntington 1968; Linz and Stepan 1996; Chebabi and Linz 1998; Brooker 2000). Robert Dahl (1971) distinguished three types of nondemocratic (nonpolyarchic) regimes, that is, closed hegemonies, competitive oligarchies, and inclusive hegemonies; I use Dahl’s typology in this study. In general, no special attention will be paid to different subtypes of nondemocratic regimes. “Nondemocratic regimes” and “authoritarian regimes” will be used as synonyms for all types of nondemocratic regimes, hence, a very diverse range of nondemocratic regimes will be covered by the terms nondemocracy and authoritarianism (cf. Brooker 2000: 22). An additional consequence of this choice is that the “institutional approach” is not covered in Chapter 4 and is excluded from the analyses in the empirical chapters. 2. Dahl (1971) emphasized that no country meets these conditions perfectly; therefore, he preferred the term polyarchies for political systems in which the conditions are sufficiently met and used the term democracy for the ideal type. 3. There are several other principles of democratic suffrage, such as the principles of equal, free, and direct elections. The principle of equality demands that the value of each vote be the same and that votes not be weighed according to property, income, education, religion, race, social class, sex, or political belief. Great Britain abolished only in 1948 unequal suffrage and special voting rights for university graduates. Under the principle of direct elections, the voters select their leaders for themselves. The electoral system of Turkey, for example, was an indirect one until 1950. In this research, however, the concept of inclusiveness/participation is limited to the existence of universal inclusive elections. 4. It is important to emphasize this conceptual choice, because a common practice in quantitative research is to confuse the following three concepts: the existence of a certain level of democracy in one point of time, the stability of democracy over time, and the transition to democracy. On the one hand, researchers such as Muller (1988, 1995a, 1995b) are strong supporters of combining democracy with stability to make research sensitive to a country’s experience of democracy over time. On the other hand, several researchers are strong opponents of combining political democracy with stability in one concept (Olsen 1968: 700; Jackman 1973: 612; Bollen 1980: 374–375 and 1991: 12–13). They oppose authors (e.g., Lipset 1959; Cutright 1963; Muller 1988) who operationalize democracy with indicators that measure both democracy and stability. Bollen indicated that combining measures of stability with measures of political democracy causes several conceptual and methodological problems. A combined measure is often aggregated over a long period and this may “average-out” many important changes in democracy that occur (Bollen 1980: 374–375). According to Bollen, stability and democracy do not have identical causes and consequences, and if an association is (or is not) found, it is not possible to determine which component is responsible (Bollen 1991: 12–13). On the other hand, Muller thought Bollen and Jackman’s research was “insensitive to a country’s experience of democracy over time” because democracy is measured in one point in time (Muller 1988: 50). According to him, research focusing on the existence of democracy in a specific year assumes that the influences on democracy are noticeable directly, while he believed in a long-term effect. The discussion of “stability or not” led to confusion in the field of quantitative research on explaining democracy. In particular, the discussion about the hypothetical relationship between income inequality and democracy illustrates this confusion. Bollen and Jackman (1985, 1989, 1995) concentrated on the existence of a certain level of democracy and found no association between income inequality and democracy. Muller (1988, 1995a, 1995b) concentrated on the transition to and stability of democracy and found an association between income inequality and the stability of democracy on

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the one hand, and no association between income inequality and the beginning of democracy, on the other. It is clear that the results of studies on associations between income inequality and democracy are fully dependent on the operationalization of democracy, that is, democracy measured as the level of democracy, the beginning of democracy, or the stability of democracy. Future studies must distinguish these three different operationalizations; moreover, future studies should first develop the hypotheses, and afterward they should adapt their operationalizations on these hypotheses. Researchers have to be aware of their conceptual choice, thus avoiding this kind of confusion in the future. In this research, I am interested in why some nondemocratic countries have undergone a transition to democracy and others have not; therefore, stability is not incorporated in my definition. 5. Multiple labels are used to indicate the same concept: this type of regime has been variously described as “minimal,” “formal,” or “electoral democracy” (Hadenius 1997; Diamond 1996); “democradura” (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 9); and “illiberal democracy” (Zakaria 1997). 6. Notice that such an advanced democracy resembles the broad, more substantial concept of “participatory democracy” discussed and defended by, among others, Carol Pateman (1970), Chantal Mouffe (1992), Bhikhu Parekh (1994), and Pinkney (1994). 7. As often occurs in the field of democratization research, there are competing terms for the same concept. Just as Collier and Levitsky (1997) and Schedler (1998a, 1998b) also called such regimes advanced democracies, O’Donnell and Schmitter gave the term socialist democracy to this concept (1986: 11–14), and David Held (1996) and Georg Sorensen (1998) used democratic autonomy to describe it. 8. Schedler presented the different concepts of democratic consolidation in a very clear and graphical way (Schedler 1998a: 94). Notice that “authoritarian regime” is a synonym for “nondemocratic regime” in his descriptions. 9. Following these arguments, the equality dimension that refers to the way the distribution of power is structured and that was measured by Ton Bertrand and Rob Van Puijenbroek (1987) should also not be confounded with the concept of democracy. This variable, which in fact measures the power of associational groups (or civil society), is important in its own right and may be considered an essential influence on the transitions to democracy. 10. Thus, the level of democracy must not be studied among all regimes, as Bollen suggested, but only among regimes of the same genus, that is, democracies may be compared for degrees of democracy (identifying variations among countries like the United States, Sweden, and Japan), or nondemocratic countries may be compared for variations of degree in nondemocracies (see Sartori 1970, 1987; O’Kane 1993). 11. Moreover, Bollen argued that a democratic system must not result per se in votes being closely split between competing parties (Bollen 1986: 572). Citizens may share a consensus on which party should rule. Finally, there is an inherent ethnocentrism, in that the multiparty system that characterizes most Western countries is de facto the most democratic. So, the meaning of the percentage of votes for different parties is ambiguous because this measurement is affected by many factors that are distinct from the concept of competition as developed by Dahl. 12. The Polity II database includes annual autocracy and democracy scores for 132 contemporary and 21 “historical” countries for the 1800–1986 period (see Gurr et al. 1991). The Polity III database includes an update of the autocracy and democracy indicators for the 1987–1994 period and a recoding of the Polity II codings for

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the 1946–1986 era. Furthermore, this data set consists of annual democracy and autocracy indicators from 1946 through 1994 for all independent countries with populations greater than 500,000 in the early 1990s. The Polity III data, which can be combined with the pre-1946 authority characteristics and regime-type data found in Polity II, encompass 161 countries that were independent during all or part of the post-1945 period, 157 of which were in existence in 1994. Polity IV contains updated, coded annual information on regime and authority characteristics for all independent states (with greater than 500,000 total population) in the global state system and covers the years 1800–2000. There are 14,423 cases in total. 13. See Doorenspleet for a justification of these choices (2001: 23–26). Notice that these minimum preconditions have all positive scores on Gurr’s scale. Comparison with Gurr’s cut-off point shows there is no doubt about the classification in 95 percent of the cases (see Doorenspleet 2001: 229–230); 95 percent of the cases are classified as “competitive” or “not competitive,” regardless of whether the cut-off point of Gurr’s dichotomy I, II, or III or my own classification of minimum preconditions has been applied. Dichotomy I = total score of positive six to positive ten on Gurr’s scale; Dichotomy II = total score of positive seven to positive ten on Gurr’s scale; Dichotomy III = sum of positive score of seven or higher on Gurr’s scale. 14. “Competitiveness of executive recruitment” with code 2 or 3 in Polity IV data set. 15. “Openness of executive recruitment” with code 3 or 4 in Polity IV data set. 16. “Competitiveness of participation” with code 0, 3, 4, or 5 in Polity IV data set. 17. “Constraints on the power of the chief executive” with code of 4, 5, 6, or 7 in Polity IV data set. 18. This means that other rich data sets on voter turnout, collected by Arthur Banks et al. (1971, 1979) and IDEA (1997), cannot be used in this research. 19. Dahl (1971) collected data for 1969. Coppedge and Reinicke (1991) collected data on inclusiveness for 170 countries in 1985, and their indicator of the right to vote has the following four categories: (1) universal suffrage; (2) suffrage with partial restrictions; (3) suffrage denied to large segments of the population; (4) no suffrage. The authors dropped this variable (and dimension) from the final scale because they came to the conclusion that it contributed very little empirically to the measurement of polyarchy. Consequently, their final scale is a unidimensional scale of contestation. This result, however, is not surprising, because the dimension of inclusiveness is not more important in 1985 than compared with earlier times. It does not mean this dimension is irrelevant altogether; because this study focuses on a longer period of time, it must be included. 20. Samuel Huntington, who collected data for a longer period of time beginning with 1800, argued that a political system is not democratic when it denies voting to parts of its society (Huntington 1991: 7). However, his data are not usable because he was not very clear and consistent in his classifications: he classified the United States until 1965, and Switzerland until 1971, as undemocratic, while a few pages later he considered these countries democratic a century earlier. It appeared that Huntington used other criteria for nineteenth-century systems, which were already classified as democratic if only 50 percent of adult males were eligible to vote. Huntington did not give a clear justification for his choices. 21. Countries that did not pass the requirement of competition are nondemocracies, so in the context of this research, there is no need to investigate the inclusiveness of these noncompetitive systems.

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22. The 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1870, secured the right to vote for black males throughout the nation. Despite this amendment, the states of the former Confederacy effectively blocked the voting rights of blacks by a variety of devices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and property qualifications. During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., demanded the restoration of black voting rights. Enactment of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act accomplished this goal. 23. Codes 1 and 2 in the “minimal democracy data set.” 24. The only way to test subjectivity in the coders’ scorings would be to give the checklists and raw country data to a very large number of experts from different countries and see how closely their scores replicate the published ones. I encourage, of course, any who want to improve or replicate the data in order to measure democracy. The decision rules I use are described and explained in previous sections of this chapter.

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3 Describing the Waves

S

ince the end of the Cold War, experts on democratization processes have been very optimistic. They believe strongly that democracy is now spreading to more and more areas of the globe, transforming political regimes in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Africa. This chapter examines and describes how much variation in political regimes has occurred across different countries and over time. How many nondemocratic regimes have moved to a democratic regime over time? And how many regimes remained nondemocratic? In addition, this chapter defines the units of observation and the period of comparison used in the rest of the research.

Defining Waves of Democratization

Several researchers argue that most democracies emerged in a series of waves, except for a few countries that followed idiosyncratic paths and changed their regime independent from what was happening to their neighbors (cf. Huntington 1991; Diamond 1993; Shin 1994; Schmitter 1995; Jaggers and Gurr 1995; Gleditsch and Ward 1997; O’Loughlin et al. 1998). Especially since the publication of Samuel Huntington’s 1991 influential study of democratization, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy occurs in waves, with bursts of progress being succeeded by quite substantial reversals, and with the pattern of flow and ebb marking a less than optimistic two-steps-forward, one-step-backward pattern. A wave of democratization is defined as a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occurs within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumbers transitions in the opposite direction. (Huntington 1991: 15) 37

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This is far from a linear process, however, and waves of democratization have also been followed by reverse waves, in which some of the democratic countries reverted to nondemocratic rule, leaving fewer cases of consolidated democracies behind. According to Huntington, there have been three distinct waves of democratization. Huntington argued that the first “long” wave flowed uninterruptedly from 1826 to 1926, marking the emergence of democratic regimes as a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Following a reverse wave, the end of World War II provided the impetus for the second, short wave of democratization. Thereafter came an enormous global swing away from democracy in the 1960s and early 1970s, which, in turn, was succeeded by a third wave of democratization that took off in the years following the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. By Philippe Schmitter’s reckoning, on the other hand, there have been four more compact waves. In addition to Huntington’s second and third waves, he thinks two earlier waves occurred: one spectacular but ephemeral wave began in 1848 and reverted in 1852, and the other major outbreak of democracy corresponded to World War I and its aftermath (Schmitter 1995: 346–350). Arguing from the vantage of the early 1990s, Huntington further contended that the three waves have entailed a far-from-optimistic pattern of progress: the proportions of democratic states in the world show a considerable regularity. At the troughs of the two reverse waves 19.7 percent and 24.6 percent of the countries were democratic. At the peaks of the two democratization waves, 45.3 percent and 32.4 percent of the countries in the world were democratic. In 1990 roughly 45.4 percent of the independent countries of the world had democratic systems, the same percentage as in 1922 . . . in 1990 the third wave of democratization still had not increased the proportion of democratic states in the world above its previous peak sixtyeight years earlier. (Huntington 1991: 25–26)

Moreover, he also suggested that, at the time he was writing, there were possible signs of a beginning of a third reverse wave, in that three “thirdwave democracies”—Haiti, Sudan, and Suriname—had quickly reverted to nondemocratic types of regimes (Huntington 1991: 14–15). Although Huntington’s study has clearly proved to be an influential one, I suggest that his analysis is far from compelling. There are two problems involved. The first is largely conceptual: Huntington’s analysis fails to provide a clear and meaningful distinction between democratic and nondemocratic regimes, in that it focuses primarily on what Dahl (1971) has defined as the dimension of competition and hence pays insufficient attention to the equally important dimension of inclusion (see Chapter 2). Huntington’s definition of democracy does follow that of Dahl in spec-

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ifying the requirements of competition and inclusiveness (1991: 7). His eventual classifications are more ambiguous and inconsistent, however, as for instance when he classifies the United States until 1965 and Switzerland until 1971 as undemocratic (1991: 7), while later indicating that both were democratic a century earlier (1991: 14–17). He also appears to adopt different criteria for nineteenth-century systems, which he classifies as having become democratic when 50 percent of adult males became eligible to vote (1991: 16). Early twentieth-century Portugal is also considered democratic, even though only male citizens then had the right to participate. In other words, despite his adoption of Dahl’s definition of democracy, his classification in practice sometimes ignores the requirement of universal suffrage. His measurement is not of democracies but of competitive political systems (or “competitive oligarchies,” as Dahl labeled such regimes). The second problem is equally acute. In brief, Huntington estimated the incidence of transitions to democracy in terms of the percentages of world states involved. Since the denominator in this equation, that is, the number of states in the world, is far from constant, this measure can obviously be misleading. As will be shown in the fourth section below, the number of democracies in the world grew from 29 in 1956 to 36 in 1972, thus appearing to reflect a small but noticeable “wave” of democratization. In percentage terms, however, this same period seems to have been characterized by a small reverse wave, in that the proportion of states that were democratic fell from 34 percent to 27 percent. The explanation for this apparent paradox is simple: largely as a result of decolonization in Africa, the number of independent states in the world—the denominator—grew from 85 to 132, and hence, although there was an absolute increase in the number of democratic regimes, their proportion of world states actually fell. In the subsequent sections of this chapter, I show why these problems matter. First, it does make a difference whether waves of competitive political systems or waves of democracies are investigated. Second, it makes a difference whether one focuses only on percentages or also takes into account the actual numbers of states that made a transition from nondemocratic to democratic regimes.

Waves of Competitive Political Systems and Waves of Democracies

To demonstrate that it makes a difference whether waves of competitive systems or waves of democracies are examined, I first look at the work of researchers who measure democracy by taking account only of Dahl’s requirement of competition. The empirical trends in the growth in competi-

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tive systems from 1800 to 2000, measured as a percentage of all countries, are summarized in Figure 3.1. This approximately replicates Huntington’s findings, albeit updated here to 2000. From this figure, the three waves of “democratization” can in fact easily be distinguished. In addition, Figure 3.1 shows that the periods of democratization in terms of waves and reverses generally closely resemble those identified by Huntington: there is an initial, long wave of democratization (1810–1922), a subsequent reverse wave (1923–1940), a second wave of democratization (1944–1957), a second reverse wave (1957–1976), and a third wave of democratization (since 1976). Although these updated figures fail to support Huntington’s statement that there is a less-than-optimistic, two-steps-forward, one-step-backward pattern, they nevertheless do show that the proportion of democratic states during the third wave rises well above its previous peaks. Huntington’s lack of optimism is probably due to the fact that his analysis ended before 1990; in the following few years the proportion of democratic states increased substantially from 44 percent in 1990 to more than 57 percent in 2000. This percentage is much higher than the percentages of democracies in the first peak—higher than the 38 percent in 1922 and also higher than the 35 percent in 1960. So, although the trend toward democratization as defined in these limited terms may not be irreversible, the long-term trend in Figure 3.1 does appear to reflect a genuine two-steps-forward, one-step-backward pattern and reveals no signs as yet (to 2000) to indicate a third reverse wave.

Figure 3.1 Percentage of Competitive Systems (by year)

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These data fail to include the requirement of “inclusive suffrage,” however, and therefore do not refer to the development of what we define as democracies. Once this second measure is included and this more complete definition of democracy is used, we may therefore expect to see quite a different pattern. As can be seen from Figure 3.2, which plots the percentage of democracies from 1800 to 2000, this is in fact the case. In this new application, the first wave is seen to begin at a much later stage, confirming that democratization in this more complete sense (i.e., that includes women’s citizenship) is actually and obviously a twentiethcentury phenomenon. Moreover, it develops relatively abruptly. While there were as yet no such democracies as late as 1890, a quarter of the world’s independent political systems had become democracies by 1923. The first peak is lower in Figure 3.2 than in Figure 3.1, in that several competitive systems had not yet granted women suffrage (e.g., Belgium, Costa Rica, France, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland) and hence, strictly speaking, cannot be considered democracies. The second peak is in 1955, also slightly lower (by 7 percent) in Figure 3.2, in that Brazil, Peru, Sudan, and Switzerland, while competitive, were not yet democracies. The second reverse “wave,” which is now much smaller in comparison with Figure 3.1, results in a fall to 26 percent in 1971. However, from this point onward the percentages are the same in both figures, thus indicating that the requirement of inclusive suffrage no longer exerts any influence. New democracies now tend to become both competitive and inclusive at their inception. The third wave also remains evident in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2 Percentage of Democracies (by year)

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An Empirical Problem

The second deficiency in Huntington’s research concerns the use of percentages rather than absolute numbers. While Huntington concentrated on percentages of democracies over time, a focus on the actual numbers of states that made a transition from nondemocracy to democracy affects the conclusion to be drawn. Until this point, I have followed the researchers who studied waves of transitions by focusing on percentages of democracies among world states (Huntington 1991; Jaggers and Gurr 1995; Gleditsch and Ward 1997). The question arises, however, whether such a focus actually provides insight into waves of transitions. Recall that a wave of democratization is defined as a group of transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracies that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction. Actually, in investigating such waves, the focus on percentages of democracies in the world may be very confusing. There are two main reasons for this. First, the fewer democracies during a reverse wave does not necessarily mean those countries reverted to nondemocratic regimes; it may mean instead, for example, that several countries have experienced an “interrupted period” in which they are dominated by foreign powers. Consider the first reverse wave from 1923 to 1940, which seems to be evident in Figure 3.2. Indeed, certain democratic regimes, such as Poland, Germany, and Italy, did retreat toward nondemocratic regimes during this period. On the other hand, countries such as Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark were democracies in the 1920s, but they did not step backward. These countries experienced a difficult period of “interruption” following the German invasion and the subsequent foreign domination of their national political regimes before being restored to democracy in 1945. In neither case, however, should they be considered part of a wave or reverse wave, because they neither moved toward (in 1940) nor away from (in 1945) nondemocratic regimes. While Huntington (1991) does not make a distinction between interrupted and genuinely authoritarian regimes (he simply considered those countries to be nondemocratic or authoritarian, during the time that they were not truly independent states), I believe this distinction is particularly important. In order to gain a better and more accurate sense of reverse waves of democratization, it is more appropriate to exclude these interrupted cases and to plot only the genuine percentages of democracies and authoritarian regimes. The principal effect of doing this, of course, is to reduce the levels of the first reverse wave of transitions. A second and more crucial problem is that changes in the proportion of democracies around the world can occur simply because the denominator—

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that is, the number of independent states—itself changes. In Figure 3.2, for example, the percentage of democracies in the world falls from more than 34 percent in 1956 to 27 percent in 1972—an evident reversal, or so it seems. Yet at the same time, the sheer numbers of democracies actually increased during this period from twenty-nine to thirty-six, suggesting significant progress toward democracy. This apparent paradox is easily explained by reference to the widespread decolonization in the African continent and the subsequent enormous growth of independent states from 85 in 1956 to 132 in 1972. Moreover, most of these new states were authoritarian, but Huntington considers this as part of a transition process, suggesting that these new states became nondemocratic at independence (1991: 20–21). In my view, however, this is certainly not evidence of a “global swing away from democracy” (Huntington 1991: 21), but is rather a process by which new nondemocratic states were simply created or installed. Hence the second reverse wave that appears in Figure 3.2 should be interpreted as a reflection not only of regime transitions away from democracy but also of the installation of many newly independent nondemocratic regimes. It is possible to gain a better and more accurate insight into the real transitions toward (and away from) democracy—and hence into the waves of democracy—by excluding those states that have either (1) experienced an interruption of their own national regimes or (2) become newly established as independent regimes,1 and by focusing on the numbers rather than the somewhat misleading percentages. In other words, by plotting the number of transitions from (independent) nondemocratic to democratic systems, less the number of transitions from democracies to nondemocratic systems over time, it is possible to get a more accurate and meaningful insight into the question of whether the transitions to democracy outnumber the transitions to nondemocratic regimes, or vice versa. In 1920, for example, this difference is (+) 5, in that Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, and the United States each became a democracy, while no single country followed the reverse path. In 1973, by contrast, the difference is (+) 1, in that three countries became democratic (Argentina, Pakistan, and Turkey), while two others reverted to a nondemocratic regime (Chile and Uruguay). The overall results of this revised analysis are summarized in Figure 3.3. In order to effect a more appropriate comparison over time, however, it may still be necessary to build in some control for the growth in the number of states in the world, particularly since this may not only increase the probability that transitions will take place, but also increase the difference between transitions to democracy and transitions to nondemocratic regimes. Consider the following hypothetical situations during two points in time:

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Figure 3.3 Number of Transitions to Minimal Democracy (by year)

(1) there are 12 countries, of which 3 make a transition to nondemocratic regimes and 4 to democracy; (2) there are 120 countries, of which 30 make a transition to nondemocratic regimes and 40 to democracy. In the first situation, transitions to democracy outnumber transitions in the opposite direction by 1, while in the second situation the relevant figure is 10. In terms of relative proportions, however, both situations are identical, and hence each might be seen to reflect an equivalent “wave.” Comparisons over time may therefore require the data to be standardized in the following manner: WT (t) where WT (t) N (2000) Trans (t) N (t)

= N (2000) * Trans (t) / N (t) = weighted number of transitions in year t = number of countries in 2000 (= 159) = number of transitions in year t = number of countries in year t

This formula takes the year 2000 as the standard against which the number of transitions will be weighted in this study.2 The standardized data are summarized in Figure 3.4, with more detailed figures on the different waves indicated there being presented in Table 3.1. Based on the standardized data, and with a view to reassessing Huntington’s three waves, the following periods can be distinguished: an impressive first wave of democratization between 1893 and 1924; a first reverse wave from 1924 until 1944; a second wave of democratization between 1944 and 1957; a period of relatively trendless fluctuation from

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Weighted Number of Transitions

Figure 3.4 Number of Weighted Transitions to Minimal Democracy (by year)

Table 3.1

Regime Transitions per Wave

Wave First wave, 1893–1924 Reverse wave, 1924–1944 Second wave, 1944–1957 Fluctuation, 1957–1976 Third wave, 1976–1989 Fourth wave, 1989–2001

Number of Transitions to Democracy

Number of Transitions to Nondemocratic Regimes

Net Transitions

Net Transitions, Weighted by Number of Countries

15 3 13 17 22 47

0 7 2 20 9 17

15 –4 11 –3 13 30

37 –9 22 –5 15 31

Note: Net transitions refer to transitions to democracy minus transitions to nondemocratic regimes.

1957–1976; and finally, a third wave of democratization between 1976 and 1989, which since then is followed by the fourth wave of democratization. The first wave of transitions to democracy before 1924 is clearly very important and very striking. It is also clear that there has been a significant wave of democratization since 1976, and that a real upsurge of transitions to democracy has occurred since 1989. What is perhaps more striking, however, is that Huntington’s other waves no longer emerge with such signifi-

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cance. Although the first reverse wave between 1924 and 1944 and the second wave of democratization during the mid 1940s and 1950s may still be distinguished, they are not as convincing as seemed apparent in Figures 3.1 and 3.2. Moreover, there is no clear second reverse wave of democratization, which, according to Huntington, should have been apparent between 1957 and the mid 1970s. In fact, this period can better be described as one of trendless fluctuation, in which there are waves of both nondemocracy and democracy. In the next section, the waves of democratization will be briefly described.3

Describing the Waves First Wave of Democratization, 1893–1924

The emergence of democracies is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Before World War I, New Zealand and Australia made the transition to democracy. During or shortly after World War I, Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the United States introduced a democratic political system. Germany also democratized. First Reverse Wave, 1924–1944

Regime changes to authoritarianism during this period reflected the rise of the ideologies of communism and fascism (Huntington 1991: 18). Hitler’s conquest of power ended German democracy. Some democracies, such as Austria and Finland, were affected and reverted to nondemocratic systems, and the democratic institutions in Poland, Latvia, and Estonia were overthrown by military coups. Although Spanish democracy was installed in 1931, a military coup led to civil war in 1936 and a return to authoritarianism in 1939. In this antidemocratic period, the only transitions to democracy were made by the competitive systems of Britain and Iceland that adopted inclusive suffrage in 1928 and 1934, respectively. Second Wave of Democratization, 1944–1957

A second short wave began with the Allied victory in World War II and continued until approximately 1960. Allied occupation promoted the installation of democratic institutions in West Germany, Japan, and Finland. The Latin American states of Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay adopted a democratic system. Furthermore, after an interruption and transition period, Austria and Italy became democratic. The competitive systems of Belgium

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and France allowed women to vote after the war, resulting in democracies, and Turkey also became a democracy. Czechoslovakia was a democracy before World War II, experienced an interruption period during the war, and turned to nondemocracy under Soviet pressure following it. Intermezzo, 1957–1976

“The global swing away from democracy in the 1960s and early 1970s was impressive,” states Huntington (1991: 21). Indeed, this research also shows that 42 percent of the countries were competitive in 1957 and 27 percent in 1976 (see Figure 3.1). The proportion of democracies decreased from 34 percent in 1957 to 26 percent in 1976 (see Figure 3.2). There is no solid evidence of a second reverse wave, however, and no clear group of transitions from democratic to nondemocratic regimes that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction. Figures 3.3 and 3.4 show a more confused period, which can better be described as an intermezzo, in which transitions to both nondemocratic regimes and democracy occurred. Since 1958, Colombia has been ruled continuously by elected civilian presidents. Also, Venezuela became a democracy in 1961. The polarized Chilean democracy was overthrown by a military coup led in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet; seventeen years of repressive rule by a rightist military regime followed. Another military coup ended democracy in Uruguay in 1973. The electoral victory of Peronism over the Radical Party that same year paved the way for a transition to civilian rule in Argentina, but in 1976 a military coup toppled the government headed by Peron’s widow. In Pakistan in 1958, President Iskander Mirza dissolved the assemblies, abrogated the constitution, and declared martial law in the country. He transferred presidential power to General Ayub Khan, who ruled by decree for over a decade. President Ayub Khan was forced to resign in 1969. General Yahya Khan replaced him and held the country’s first general elections in 1970. These elections were followed by a bloody civil war. After the secession of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) from Pakistan in 1971, the discredited military was replaced by the democratically elected regime of Zulifikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto restored the parliamentary system in 1973 and Pakistan made a transition back to minimal democracy. Turkey’s second try at democracy started in 1961 but was again interrupted by military intervention from 1971 until 1973. Third Wave of Democratization, 1976–1989

Compared with previous waves, the third wave of democratization has been more global. This wave began in southern Europe in the 1970s in

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Portugal, Greece, and Spain, then spread to Latin America. In Ecuador, military withdrawal and elections in 1979 produced a civilian government. A year later, a civilian president was elected in Peru. Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Uruguay, Honduras, and Brazil turned to democracy in the early 1980s. This wave of democratization also affected some Asian countries in the late 1980s. The assassination of Benigno Aquino in 1983 led to civilian protests, the end of the Marcos dictatorship three years later, and the turn to Philippine democracy. The nondemocratic system of South Korea moved to democracy in 1988. In Africa, the movement to democracy was very limited and, above all, not enduring. Ghana, led by Hilla Limann, moved to a democracy in 1979, then moved back to nondemocracy two years later when Jerry Rawlings came to power following a coup. Nigeria’s rather corrupted democracy proved to be unstable and ended within four years. Fourth Wave of Democratization, 1989–2001

The movement toward democracy since 1989 has been overwhelming and global. At the end of the 1980s, the wave swept through Eastern Europe, with the Hungarian transition to a semidemocratic system beginning in 1988. In 1990, Hungary moved to democracy. In 1989, Poland became democratic after elections for a national parliament and a president; the voters chose the leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, to lead a noncommunist government. Russia began to liberalize and the communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania collapsed. The 1990s saw widespread, rapid collapse of nondemocratic regimes in Africa, and more than a dozen democracies emerged. This recent democratization wave was not only more global and affected more countries than earlier waves, there were also relatively fewer regressions to nondemocratic regimes than in the past. In this period, Gambia’s democratic tradition of almost three decades ended with a military coup in 1994. The democracy of Peru reversed in 1992 when President Alberto Fujimori declared a state of emergency, gave himself special powers, and dissolved the legislature. This autogolpe (“self-coup”) took place under siege by drug traffickers and the Shining Path, a guerrilla group. During the fourth wave of democratization, there were forty-seven transitions to democracy and only eighteen transitions back to nondemocratic regimes. This can be considered a real wave of democratization: the difference of transitions to and from democracy (“outnumbered transitions”) is twenty-nine. No earlier wave has ever contained such a large number of net transitions. It clearly shows that the period since 1989 is the most interesting period to be investigated, and that one can really speak about an impressive, explosive wave.

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Conclusion

This chapter has investigated the extent of variation in transitions of political regimes that has occurred across states and over time. If the aggregated percentages of democratic regimes in the world over time are considered and studied, the three waves initially identified by Huntington can be distinguished. When the requirement of inclusive suffrage is included, however, the first wave is seen to begin much later, indicating that transitions to democracy are a twentieth-century phenomenon. Moreover, the peaks of the first and second waves of democratization also appear to be lower. This research does not support Huntington’s statement that there is a less-thanoptimistic, two-steps-forward, one-step-backward pattern. Although the trend toward democratization may not be irreversible, the long-term trends in Figure 3.1 and 3.2 do point clearly to more long-term progress than Huntington suggested. This analysis has also suggested that the focus on percentages of transitions may prove to be misleading. Since these percentages are susceptible to changes in the numbers of world states as well as in the numbers of transitions themselves, I have argued that a more accurate and meaningful impression of the real waves of democratization can be achieved by plotting the real numbers involved in both transitions from nondemocratic regimes to democracy, and vice versa. These numbers have been standardized to facilitate a genuine comparison over time. This new approach suggests that although the first wave of transitions to democracy still appears to be very striking, there is no longer strong evidence of a second reverse wave, while the explosion of democratization in the period since 1989—in which an impressive total of forty-two authoritarian regimes effected a transition to democracy—emerges with real force. These findings are relevant for a number of reasons. First, the results show how important it is to have a clear conceptualization and classification of “democratic regime.” Scholars interested in historical processes of regime changes in order to identify waves of democratization should always use a consistent distinction between democratic and nondemocratic regimes. In addition, they should pay attention not only to the dimension of competition but also to that of inclusiveness. This latter dimension is particularly important before the 1970s, when it discriminates powerfully between regimes. Since the 1970s, by contrast, almost all competitive regimes have been characterized by inclusive suffrage. By taking into account the dimension of inclusive suffrage, one sees that the first wave of democratization starts later and the second reverse wave is less distinctive. Second, the findings in this chapter emphasize that future researchers should be more aware of the implications of the changing number of states over time. Those who focus on percentages of democratic regimes among

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world states assume a fixed underlying geography; they typically think the topology remains constant. World history, however, has witnessed the emergence of many new states, as a consequence, for example, of African decolonization in the 1960s and the independence of the former Soviet republics in 1991. By calculating the number of states (instead of percentages) that made a transition from nondemocracy to democracy, or vice versa, one gains better insight into the real waves of democratization. Third, these results indicate that future studies should be careful in comparing and explaining different waves of democratization. Huntington himself recommends such a comparison: “If the third wave of democratization slowed down or came to a halt, what factors may produce and characterize a third reverse wave? The experience of the first and second reverse wave may be relevant” (1991: 292). Although it is reasonable to expect that prior experiences suggest potential causes of future developments, future studies in which reverse waves are compared will be quite useless, because there are no clear reverse waves.4 Fourth, these findings are important not just because they suggest a somewhat altered sequencing and a more accurate count of democratization waves, but also because they imply real doubt about whether the wave metaphor is the most appropriate way to conceptualize the problem. Since reverse waves are not really apparent from these data, it may be better to think in terms of “steps” in the process of democratization, rather than waves as such. There are certainly flows, but the ebbs are less evident than had been averred. How one counts waves influences the way one thinks about the prospects for continued expansion of democracy in the world. Many researchers simply anticipate a reverse wave in the near future because they think that each wave is inevitably followed by a reverse wave. Are we on the edge of such a reversal? On the basis of the findings reported here, we now know that it is empirically possible for a wave of democratic expansion to be followed for some time not by a reverse wave, but by an equilibrium in which the overall number of democracies in the world neither increases nor decreases significantly. It seems then that a period of trendless fluctuation is empirically more likely than a reverse wave. Finally, these results clearly show that the period after the Cold War will be the most interesting period to investigate. From 1989 until 2001, an impressive number of forty-two nondemocratic regimes made a transition to democracy. The explosion of democratic transitions since the end of the Cold War is striking. These positive developments should be seen in perspective, however. In particular, the Middle East seemed immune to change, and the democratic wave did not engulf Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and Libya. In Algeria, democratic experiments came abruptly to an end in 1992, when the first competitive elections led to a victory of Islamic fundamentalists. More than fifty countries remained nondemocratic.5 The political

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regimes that remained nondemocratic and those regimes that made a transition to democracy from 1989 until 2001 are listed in Figures 3.5–3.7. Hence, the central focus of this book remains relevant: although democracy is now spreading to more and more corners of the globe, contrasts remain, and it is interesting to investigate why some nondemocratic

Figure 3.5

Transitions to Democracies During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001

Albania (1992) Albania (1997) Armenia (1998) Bangladesh (1991) Benin (1991) Bulgaria (1990) Central African Republic (1993) Chile (1989) Comoro Islands (1990) Congo-Brazzaville (1992) Croatia (2000) Czechoslovakia (1990) Fiji (1990) Guatemala (1996) Guinea-Bissau (1994)

Figure 3.6

Guinea-Bissau (2000) Guyana (1992) Haiti (1990) Haiti (1994) Hungary (1990) Indonesia (1999) Lesotho (1993) Lithuania (1991) Madagascar (1992) Malawi (1994) Mali (1992) Mexico (1994) Mongolia (1992) Mozambique (1994) Nepal (1990) Nicaragua (1990)

Niger (1992) Niger (1999) Nigeria (1999) Panama (1989) Paraguay (1992) Poland (1989) Romania (1990) Russia (1992) Russia (2000) Senegal (2000) South Africa (1994) Sierra Leone (1996) Taiwan (1992) Thailand (1992) Yugoslavia (2000) Zambia (1991)

Political Regimes That Remained Nondemocratic During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001

Afghanistan Algeria Angola Azerbaijan Bahrain Bhutan Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Chad China Côte d’Ivoire Cuba Djibouti Egypt Estonia Ethiopia

Gabon Ghana Guinea Iran Iraq Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Libya Mauritania Morocco Myanmar (Burma) North Korea Oman

Rwanda Saudi Arabia Singapore Sudan Swaziland Syria Tajikistan Tanzania Togo Tunisia Turkmenistan Uganda United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam Yemen Zimbabwe

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Figure 3.7

Transitions Back to Nondemocratic Regimes During the Fourth Wave, 1989–2001

Albania (1996) Armenia (1995) Belarus (1995) Comoro Islands (1999) Congo-Brazzaville (1997) Fiji (2000)

Gambia (1994) Guinea-Bissau (1998) Haiti (1991) Haiti (1999) Lesotho (1998) Niger (1996)

Pakistan (1999) Peru (1992) Russia (1993) Sierra Leone (1997) Zambia (1996)

regimes have undergone a transition toward a democratic political system while others have not since the impressive wave of transitions to democracy started in 1989.

Notes 1. One could object that I neglect the new state’s choice of its own regime type by excluding those states that have become newly established as independent regimes. However, Huntington himself defines a wave as a group of transitions, and I do not regard as “transitions” the institution of new regimes as a result of decolonization. Processes of state building should be separated from processes of transition. 2. This is the final year in this study. 3. This global trend of democratization tells nothing, of course, about the pattern to democracy of an individual case. The routes of change were diverse. And it is important to detect different patterns because these differences may influence the consolidation of the democratic regimes created. In this study, no particular attention is given to the histories of regime changes, because consolidation of democracies is not the topic here. 4. Actually, my idea initially was to explore the causes of the second reverse wave in order to predict causes of a possible reverse wave and to predict which countries are most vulnerable for transitions to nondemocratic regimes in the future. However, this chapter showed that there was no real second reverse wave. Consequently, the remaining research will be limited mainly to the “explosive” fourth wave of democratization since 1989. 5. In addition, most new democracies do not guarantee civil liberties such as freedom of the press. Although this research indicates that the transitions to democracies are global in their reach and enormous in number since 1989, the deepening of democracies into liberal democracies is not that spectacular. Many new democracies are not fully free. Only a few states that made a transition from nondemocratic regimes to democracy can be considered liberal democracies. It would be interesting to study why these regimes cannot develop toward liberal democracies, while others can. Such a study, however, is beyond the scope of this book.

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4 The Theoretical Approaches

T

he central question of this book asks for a comparison of different political regimes: only through comparative methods can particular causes or conditions be identified that push some political regimes to democracy and not others. There is a large literature on the problems of how and when to compare (Przeworski and Teune 1970: 3–46; Lijphart 1971). In this study, regimes are compared in the following way: First, states that were independent and nondemocratic just before 1989, at the beginning of the fourth wave of democratization, must be identified, and of these regimes, those that made a transition to democracy during the fourth wave must be detected. In the previous chapter, this first task was fulfilled, and the states that remained nondemocratic and those that made a transition to democracy were listed. A second task is to find common factors associated with regimes that made transitions to democracy, and in addition, to determine that these factors are not associated with political regimes that have remained nondemocratic since 1989. The following chapters focus on this second task. To derive possible explanatory factors, it is useful to look at a variety of theoretical approaches, which offer a set of ideas, generalizations, and arguments to help identify the most important factors. As I already described in Chapter 1, the field of democratization has been dominated by actor-oriented and structural approaches. This study focuses only on structural approaches. Over the past four decades the following structural schools of research have been the prevailing ones: the modernization schools, the dependency and world-system schools, and the historicalstructural approach. These theories began in different historical contexts, were influenced by different theoretical traditions, offered different explanations and solutions to democratization questions, and used different methodologies.1 I do not try here to test the strength of the theories as such in explain53

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ing transitions to democracy; the reason I use them is altogether more pragmatic in that theoretical approaches will help to define what questions are worth examining. In addition, the theoretical approaches are important in this study as a source of tools. I draw on general theoretical frameworks to help detect the most important variables that might impact the likelihood of a transition to democracy. Is such an eclectic way of investigation controversial? In theory, yes, but in practice, no. The symposium on the topic of “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics,” in World Politics (Kohli et al. 1995), suggested that theory plays an important role in the work of scholars of comparative politics; several who participated admitted that theories often assisted them in making an eclectic combination in order to explain a certain phenomenon. Adam Przeworski at first resisted the invitation to speak about approaches in comparative politics, because he considered himself an “opportunist who believes in doing or using whatever works . . . So, I have no principles” (Kohli et al. 1995: 16). Other scholars even argued that eclecticism has its own value. For example, Peter Evans explained that when trying to distinguish the behavior of multinational firms from that of local entrepreneurs, I have drawn (parasitically) on a rudimentary set of propositions [from different theories]. The result was eclectic and messy, but it helped illuminate the case . . . No single ready-made theoretical model can provide all tools necessary to explain the cases I am interested in, but an eclectic combination offers enough leverage to make a start. (Kohli et al. 1995: 5)

In addition, the use of theoretical propositions from different approaches may appear to be a source of vulnerability, but it also makes new ideas easier to absorb. Eclecticism does not mean unsystematic selection and unsystematic inquiry. The pitfall of current studies of democratization is “unsystematic eclecticism.” An “inflation” of explanatory variables is now springing up. Numerous variables can be identified to explain democratization, and overdetermination is a real problem in this research field. Some authors even argue that systematic inquiry is not necessary because “in politics, almost everything has many causes. . . . The theories relating these factors to democracy and democratization are almost always plausible. Each variable and theory, however, is likely to have relevance to only a few cases” (Huntington 1991: 37–38). I do not agree with such a statement but believe that theories and the systematic study of the influence of different factors do throw light on the general question posed in this study. Only a systematic comparative study, in which several explanations are combined, can decide whether a particu-

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lar explanation is generally applicable or not. Only then can it be determined which influence has the most explanatory power, and only then can the researcher claim to work in a scientific way, because science requires “systematic inquiry, building toward an ever more highly-differentiated set of ordered propositions about the empirical world” (Goodin and Klingemann 1996: 9). In short, Chapter 4 passes from the analysis of variance in transitions toward democracy to the actual determinants of this variance. Several theoretical approaches on democratization are described and reviewed. In the final section, an overview of the different determinants mentioned in the structural theories is given, and on the basis of the theoretical overview, a theoretical model is developed and presented.

The Modernization Approach The Classical Modernization Theories

The modernization school was part of the more general American optimism of the period after World War II. The United States emerged as a superpower with the winning of the war and the implementation of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Western Europe. While this superpower extended its influence to other parts of the world, the second superpower (the Soviet Union) promoted the spread of a united world communist movement to Eastern Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa. Moreover, in the post–World War II era, European colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America disintegrated, giving birth to many new states in the third world. In this historical context, it was not surprising that Western social scientists were encouraged to study recently independent states, in order to promote economic development and political stability and to counteract the influence of communism and the Soviets in these new states. A central question was how traditional societies could achieve the same economic and social welfare systems and democracy as modern societies. The field of modernization research was established in the 1950s and early 1960s as a new area of comparative politics by a group of U.S. scholars. Its institutional origin lies in the creation in 1954 of the Committee on Comparative Politics by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This committee was founded to study modernization and the communications media (Pye 1963), bureaucracy (LaPalombara 1963), education (Coleman 1965), political culture (LaPalombara and Weiner 1966), and crisis and sequences in political development (Binder et al. 1971). A major series of texts on modernization was published in Studies in Political Development and the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.

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The “scientific” spirit of this period dominated the development of the modernization school. The theorists wanted to contribute to the creation of a truly modern science of politics by finding a comprehensive theoretical framework in which their practical goal to establish stable, pro-Western regimes around the world could be addressed (Cammack 1997: 63). Thus from the beginning, the modernization school was in search of a theory, and it adopted elements from both the evolutionary approach and the functionalist approach to create a theoretical framework. The evolutionary theory assumes that social change is unidirectional, progressive, and gradual, irreversibly moving societies from a primitive to an advanced stage and making societies more like one another as they proceed along the path of evolution. On the basis of this assumption, the theorists implicitly saw the concept of modernization as a phased process. Walt Rostow, for example, distinguished five stages in the evolution of societies (1960, 1964). He argued that all societies started from the traditional stage and that the best way for achieving the transition to more advanced stages was to follow the same path of change as the one traveled by developed capitalist states. In this view, development is perceived as transformation from the traditional to the modern society. In his book The Passing of Traditional Society, Daniel Lerner considered democracy a part of the last historical phase: The secular evolution of a participant society appears to involve a regular sequence of three phases. Urbanization comes first, for cities alone have developed the complex of skills and resources which characterize the modern industrial economy. Within this urban matrix develop both of the attributes which distinguish the next two phases—literacy and media growth. There is a close reciprocal relationship between these, for the literate develop the media which in turn spread literacy. But, historically, literacy performs the key function in the second phase. The capacity to read, at first acquired by relatively few people, equips them to perform the varied tasks required in the modernizing society. Not until the third phase, when the elaborate technology of industrial development is fairly well advanced, does a society begin to produce newspapers, radio networks, and motion pictures on a massive scale. This, in turn accelerates the spread of literacy. Out of this interaction develop those institutions of participation (e.g., voting) which we find in all advanced modern societies. (Lerner 1958: 60)

In addition, modernization is regarded as a homogenizing process. As time goes by, all societies will increasingly resemble one another “because the patterns of modernization are such that the more highly modernized societies become, the more they resemble one another” (Levy 1967: 207). Modernization theories also assume that modernization is an irreversible, progressive, and lengthy process. It cannot be stopped, and in the end, all

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states will be modernized. Moreover, this universal process is not only irreversible but also desirable. The theorists are very optimistic; since the West has modernized, the third world can also.2 The functionalist theory of change, together with the Parsonian concepts of structure and functional prerequisites, constitutes the second pillar of the theoretical framework of modernization theories. The basic idea is that all political systems perform the same set of functions, although these functions may be performed by different structures from one society to another. Tradition and modernity are incompatible. The functionalist theorists wanted not only to compare political systems in static terms but also to explain their development. Political development could be explained by relating system challenges to system responses (Cammack 1997: 63–90). Modernization is considered a systematic and immanent process. Change is built into the system and modernity involves change in all aspects of the system, such as differentiation, secularization, urbanization, industrialization, and participation. According to this approach, the lack of modernization is due to internal factors of the system. It might be clear that the modernization approach has not only theoretical but also policy implications. This approach justifies the asymmetrical power relationship between traditional and modern societies; identifies the threat of communism in the third world as a modernization problem; blames internal factors of the system for the lack of modernization, including democratization; and legitimates the foreign-aid policy of the United States. The period’s strong reliance on science encouraged modernization theorists to adopt not only the shared similar theoretical framework but also a corresponding methodology; that is, studies are done at a highly general and abstract level and hypotheses are tested with quantitative data. The starting point for the empirical quantitative modernization studies on explaining democratization was the article “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” in the American Political Science Review, written by Seymour Martin Lipset (1959; see also Lipset 1960, 1993, 1994). Lipset’s 1959 article generated new insights and was a powerful force in the development of so-called modernization theory. Lipset asserted that theoretical and empirical explorations show that democracy is related to a state’s socioeconomic development, meaning that the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy. From Aristotle down to the present, men have argued that only in a wealthy society in which relatively few citizens lived in real poverty could a situation exist in which the mass of the population could intelligently participate in politics and could develop the self-restraint

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necessary to avoid succumbing to the appeals of irresponsible demagogues. A society divided between a large impoverished mass and a small favored elite would result either in oligarchy . . . or in tyranny. (Lipset 1959: 75)

Lipset demonstrated in a large, cross-national quantitative study that there is a strong positive association between development and democracy. For comparison, he distinguished Europe and Western, English-speaking states as one region and Latin America as the other. The first region consisted of two types of political systems: stable democracies on the one hand versus unstable democracies and dictatorships on the other. The second region also included two types of political systems: democracies and unstable dictatorships versus stable dictatorships.3 Lipset found that no matter what index was used for economic development (indices of wealth, education, industrialization, or urbanization), within each of the two regions the mean score was always higher for democratic states than for dictatorships. More-democratic states have a higher average level of economic development than do dictatorships (Lipset 1959: 75–77). Knowing that establishing correlation is not the same as proving causality, Lipset discussed various causal factors that might link economic development and democracy. The most important process that underlies the correlation is the nature of class struggle. 4 Increased wealth is related causally to the development of democracy because it changes the social conditions of workers, by increasing the extent to which the lower strata are exposed to cross-pressures that will make them less receptive to extremist ideologies. Increased wealth moderates the lower classes and thus makes them more prone to accept and even support the status quo. It also affects the political role of the middle class through changing the shape of the stratification base to a diamond with a growing middle class. According to Lipset, a large middle class plays a mitigating role in moderating conflict since “it is able to reward moderate and democratic parties and penalize extremist groups” (Lipset 1959: 83). Although Lipset’s study has often been criticized,5 there has been an explosion in the number of articles and books that studied the explanation of democracy in a similar way (see Chapter 5 below). All these studies tended to define development as a purely economic phenomenon. The researchers focused on per capita income as a measurement of development, which is easier to measure than nonmonetary indicators such as literacy and life expectancy. Income was usually calculated from gross national product, which is the total domestic and foreign output produced by the residents of a state. Expressing these magnitudes in terms of population averages results in the gross national product per capita. The studies adopted similar methodologies: they tested hypotheses in

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quantitative empirical analyses and tried to find general explanations for the existence of democratic political regimes. Their methods were quite static in that the analyses all focus on one point in time. On the basis of such static studies, researchers believed and simply assumed that the strength of the relationship between development and the existence of democracy had been constant over time. Tatu Vanhanen explained theoretically that “correlations have remained stable over time because human nature is the same today as it was in the 1850s” (Vanhanen 1997: 69–70). Modernization is considered to be a universal process that occurs regardless of time or place. This assumption, however, has not been made on the basis of empirical research tests to determine whether the relationship is stable in strength over time. Moreover, on the basis of the positive relationship between development and the likelihood that a regime is democratic at a certain point in time, researchers have simply assumed that states with a higher level of development are also the most likely ones to become democratic.6 This assumption also has not yet been tested in empirical research. Finally, although classical modernization theorists declared that an intervening variable such as class structure is important, they have not tested the empirical strength of this variable in quantitative research. In conclusion, on the basis of the description above, the following classical modernization hypotheses can be formulated: 1. There is a positive relationship between development (measured by per capita income) and the probability that a state is democratic. 2. There is a positive relationship between development (measured by per capita income) and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy. 3. The relationship between development and democracy is stable in strength over time. 4. There is an indirect relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. Development increases the size of the middle class, and the middle class increases the probability that a state undergoes a transition to democracy. New Modernization Theories

During a period of severe criticism in the 1970s, the classical modernization school remained silent and paid little attention to its critics. In the late 1970s, the modernization theorists began to take the criticisms seriously,

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dropped some assumptions, and modified their old theoretical frameworks. A new modernization school was born. The critics of the classical modernization school had reservations mainly about the evolutionary and functionalist assumptions, the methodology, and the neglect of external and intervening influences. First to be attacked were the classical modernization assumptions. Critics doubted there is one universal positive process of unidirectional development. Modernization is not a linear process in history. Why do third world states need to move in the direction of Western states? Why is this process inevitable and irreversible? Why are Western states viewed as “advanced” and “modern” and third world states are placed at the beginning of the evolutionary path and viewed as “primitive” and “traditional”? The critical authors argued that this belief in the Western development model is ethnocentric. Neo-Marxists even stated that this approach was used to justify U.S. intervention in third world states (Frank 1969a, 1969b). Moreover, critics argued that classical modernization theorists overlooked alternative paths of development for third world states. Also, the functionalist assumptions have been challenged. Critics attacked the idea that all political systems perform the same set of functions, although these functions may be performed by different structures from one society to another. This functionalist theoretical framework was both too abstract and too specific: “too abstract in its determination to produce a universal model of the political system and the political process divorced from the social context in which each was embedded, but too specific in its direct derivation of the model from the familiar political institutions of Britain and the United States” (Cammack 1997: 63–64). Moreover, critics did not accept the distinction between tradition and modernity. Third world states have heterogeneous value systems, and traditional and modern values are not mutually exclusive. Traditional values are not always obstacles to modernization; they can sometimes even be helpful, according to the critics. Modernization cannot displace traditional values; these will always be present in the process, and tradition and modernity are thus not incompatible. Second, the classical modernization school has been criticized for its methodology. Modernization studies are done at such a high level of abstraction that the state and historical period discussed are unclear. In addition, critics considered it problematic to draw conclusions about changes in time and causation from cross-sectional analyses at a given point in time. Modernization theories did not take the historical dimension into account, the critics argued (O’Donnell 1979). Moreover, critics charged that modernization theorists believed in the possibility of objective social science that was free of ideology. Finally, classical modernization researchers believed in universal laws in the social sciences. Critics consid-

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ered this belief the “universalistic fallacy”; they did not support the assumption that the explanation of democratization is similar for all states, all regions, and for different points in time (see O’Donnell 1979; Cammack 1997: 85–90). Third, critics argued that classical modernization theories have neglected the influence of external and intervening factors. Focusing on internal factors, the modernization school paid little attention to external factors such as foreign domination, colonialism, control of multinational corporations over third world economies, the unequal pattern of trade between Western and third world states, and the nature of the international system. In addition, critics emphasized the importance of intervening variables. The linkage between development and democracy is strong, but wealth alone does not automatically produce democracy. Additional intervening factors are crucial. Although Lipset discussed various causal factors that might link economic development and democracy, he has not tested them empirically. In the late 1970s, modernization theorists began to take these criticisms seriously and, as a consequence, to differ from classical modernization studies. The new approach avoids treating tradition and modernity as a set of mutually exclusive concepts, and it does not equate modernization with Westernization. It does not assume a unidirectional linear path of development and brings the impact of history back in. More attention is paid to processes and sequences of democratic development. Hence, first of all, new modernization theorists dropped the assumption of universality. Samuel Huntington, for example, proposed that the explanations for transitions to democracy probably differ over time (Huntington 1976, 1984, 1991). Before he started to study concretely whether more states became democratic and which preconditions favored democratic development, he stated that the assumption of universality is not valid. The combination of causes generally responsible for one wave of democratization differs from that responsible for other waves, and the causes responsible for the initial regime changes in a democratization wave are likely to differ from those responsible for later regime changes in that wave, according to Huntington (1991: 38). Also, Larry Diamond (1992) suggested that the causal relationship between development and democracy is not stable over time and may vary across periods in history. Second, recent modernization theorists pay attention to other influences besides economic development. They suggest that no single factor is sufficient or is necessary to explain the development of democracy in all states. In particular, they consider the impact of intervening and external international factors. The importance of the intervening variable of class structure is notably pointed out (Huntington 1991; Diamond et al. 1995; Inglehart 1997). Economic development promotes the expansion of the middle class, and democracy is difficult in a situation of concentrated

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inequalities in which a large, impoverished majority confronts a small, wealthy elite. New modernization theorists study not only intervening variables but also international influences on democracy.7 Democratic diffusion, demonstration, or snowballing effects are important in particular, according to Huntington. Democracy in authoritarian states is stimulated by new means of international communication and by democracy in neighboring states (Huntington 1991: 100–106).8 The number of democratic regimes increases by the process of diffusion. A nondemocratic regime surrounded by democratic neighbors will be more likely to collapse and undergo a transition to democracy. Successful democratization in one state can encourage other states also to make a transition to democracy. Third, researchers changed their methodology from variable oriented and quantitative to more case oriented and qualitative. For example, the books in which Diamond with other researchers analyzed several important influences on democracy contain many (10 to 26) case studies (see Diamond et al. 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1995). In addition, Huntington (1991) tested only the relationship between development and democracy by quantitative empirical analyses; the other expected influences are “proved” by describing the situation in some particular states. Finally, broader, nonmonetary types of measures of the concept of development recently have been recommended above purely economic measurements like GNP per capita. It is argued that nonmonetary indicators better reflect the development of the people in a state on average (Ghatak 1995: 34–42), and “because money income can be far more unequally distributed than years of life expectancy or schooling, per capita figures for GNP are less reliable indicators of average human development in a state than are national averages for the latter non-monetary types of measures” (Diamond 1992: 100). Moreover, new modernization theorists point out that Lipset’s argument for the relationship between development and democracy seemed based on development of the people in general, and not of the state. They emphasize Lipset’s statement that “education presumably broadens men’s outlooks, enables them to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to extremist and monistic doctrines, and increases their capacity to make rational electoral choices” (Lipset 1959: 79). Actually, new modernization theorists reinterpret Lipset’s argument that when the people of a state are more developed, they are more inclined to believe in democratic values and support a democratic system. Consequently, the measurement of development must now change the focus from development of the state (measured by GNP) to development of the people on average (measured by education, for example). It is interesting that Diamond indeed concluded from his study that “it is a country’s mean level of ‘human development’ or physical quality of life, more than its per

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capita level of money income, that better predicts its likelihood of being democratic” (Diamond 1992: 102). That is why a refined understanding of development leads to broader, nonmonetary types of measures in new modernization studies. In conclusion, on the basis of the description above, the following new modernization hypotheses can be formulated: 5. There is a positive relationship between development (measured by the human development index) and the probability that a state is democratic. 6. A broader measurement of (human) development is more closely related with the probability that a state is democratic than a purely economic measure of development. 7. There is a positive relationship between development (measured by human development) and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy. 8. The relationship between development and democracy may vary over time and across waves of democratization. 9. There is an indirect relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. Development increases the size of the middle class, and the middle class increases the probability that a state undergoes a transition to democracy. 10. There is a direct positive influence of democratic neighbors on the probability that a state becomes democratic. A nondemocratic regime surrounded by democratic neighbors will be more likely to make a transition to democracy than a nondemocratic regime surrounded by nondemocratic neighbors.

The Dependency and World-System Approach The “Radical” Dependency Theories

While the modernization school started in the optimistic period after World War II, the dependency approach emerged in the more pessimistic period of the 1960s. Daniel Chirot analyzed this period as follows: The American debacle in Vietnam and the eruption of major racial troubles in the mid 1960s, followed by chronic inflation, the devaluation of the American dollar, and the general loss of America’s self-confidence in the early 1970s, ended the moral conviction on which modernization theory had come to base itself. A new type of theory became popular among

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younger sociologists, one that reversed all of the old axioms. America became the very model of evil, and capitalism, which had been seen as the cause of social progress, became a sinister exploiter and the main agent of poverty in most of the world. Imperialism, not backwardness and the lack of modernity, was the new enemy. (Chirot 1981: 259–260)

In this historical context, the school of dependency was established with its own theorists. The theorists responded to the failure of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) program and to the modernization school. First, the dependency school arose in Latin America as a reaction to the failure of the ECLA program. Raúl Prebisch, who was the director and theorist of the ECLA, concluded that the underdevelopment of Latin America was due to its reliance on the export of primary products to the industrial states of the capitalist system. The solution to this problem was to industrialize and to finish the one-sided international division of labor. The process of industrialization would be speeded up by substitution domestic production for a large part of current imports. Production of raw materials would continue to play an important role in Latin American economies: the income earned from exporting raw materials would be used to pay for imported capital goods and thus help increase the rate of economic growth (Blomstrom and Hettne 1984: 41–42). However, the ECLA program did not succeed, pushing the dependency school to promote a more radical program. Second, the dependency school attacked and criticized the modernization theorists. According to dependency theorists, traditional society was a myth and the so-called underdeveloped economies were not going through Walt Rostow’s early stages that supposedly preceded maturity, because centuries of exposure to the modernized West had turned them into colonies. Nor did the advanced economies correspond to Rostow’s typology, because their wealth was based on exploitation of the “underdeveloped.” Rostow’s stages and the rest of modernization theory were nothing more than selfserving mythology. Dependency theorists pointed out that modernization theorists were ahistorical and that they managed both to deny any history to third world states by simply calling them traditional and to ignore the fact that it was precisely this history that explained their underdevelopment (Preston 1996: 194). Dependency theorists rejected the modernization idea that the states of Latin America were dual societies with a traditional and a modern sector and that modernizing impulses would spread to these so-called backward areas. The modernization strategy of looking to stages of economic development was rejected in favor of historical analyses, which would deal with patterns of underdevelopment within Latin America, given its particular position within the global system. The dependency approach assumed that the development of a national or regional unit could only be understood in

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connection with its historical position in the worldwide political-economic system. Hence, this perspective rejected the modernization assumption that the state as an independent “billiard ball” can be the unit of analysis in studying underdevelopment. In reaction to the internal explanation of the modernization school, dependency theorists offered an external explanation for third world development. Andre Gunder Frank formulated the concept of the “development of the underdevelopment” to point out that underdevelopment is an artifact created by a long history of colonial dominance in the third world (e.g., Frank 1969a: 3–8). Moreover, he developed a “metropolis-satellite model” to explain how underdevelopment works. The basic point is that Latin America had been turned into a satellite of the capitalist metropolises of Europe and North America. The metropolitan-satellite relationship is unequal and dependent, because the satellite states lack the resources to choose alternative ways of responding to the constraints imposed on them from the international environment. International structures determine the national economies of dependent states, what they produce, how, and for whom. The rich metropolis is rich thanks to exploitation of the poor satellites, so development is automatically the reverse side of underdevelopment, according to Frank (1969a: 8–14). Whereas modernization theorists believe that modernization leads to more development, equality, and more democracy, dependency theorists are absolutely more pessimistic. According to the dependency school, states with high levels of dependency are likely to have unequal distributions of income, low levels of economic development, and authoritarian political systems (see Kaufman et al. 1975: 306–309; Amin 1976; Frank 1969a, 1969b; Hout 1992). Dependency researchers point out that satellite states should not be dominated by the metropolis with its foreign aid and technology, but should adopt a self-reliance model; they should rely upon their own resources and trade with other satellite states on equal terms, in order to become independent of the metropolis. Although dependency theorists do not speak with a single voice, they seem to share several assumptions. First, underdevelopment in a particular state can only be understood when it is seen as an effect of that state’s position and function in the larger world-system. This holistic assumption leads to a global model, in which dependency is viewed as a general process, applicable to all third world states. Second, development in satellite states is mainly determined by external factors (like the unequal international division of labor and a colonial history) that lie outside the domain of the national economy. The dependency school emphasizes the way internal and external factors are interconnected, so underdevelopment is not explained by external factors only (Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1993: 206), but external factors are very important. Third, the dependency school works primari-

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ly with economic analysis. Problems of dependence are based on the interaction of different economies, the unequal division of labor, and the flow of economic surplus from satellite states to the metropolis. Fourth, the authors accentuate the fact that a regional polarization occurs in the total system. Underdevelopment in the satellite states and development in the metropolis are two aspects of a single process, leading to regional polarization. Fifth, according to this school, development and democracy are totally incompatible with any kind of dependence. Autonomous development in third world states is considered impossible without a reversal of the dependency situation (Blomstrom and Hettne 1984: 71–76). In conclusion, the following hypothesis evolves from the theoretical ideas of the radical dependency approach as described above: 11. There is a negative relationship between economic dependency and development. The “Modified” Dependency Theories

The theoretical positions of dependency theorists are far from homogenous. Especially in the 1970s there was heterogeneity; thereafter new theories arose within the dependency school, after a period of critique of the modernization school on the methodology, assumptions of holism, and neglect of internal factors such as class conflict and the state.9 These new theories have modified the assumptions of Frank’s radical dependency theory. First, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a key author in the modified dependency school, abandoned the holistic general assumption and narrowed his analysis to concrete cases of dependent states. His approach emphasized “not just the structural conditioning of social life, but also the historical transformation of structures by conflict, social movements, and class struggles. Thus our methodology is historical-structural” (quoted in Blomstrom and Hettne 1984: 48). Second, Cardoso was more inclined to emphasize internal factors, such as conflict, and class struggles. Third, the radical dependency theorists worked mainly with economic analysis, whereas the “modified” dependency theorists emphasized both economic and political conditions. Cardoso paid attention to the sociopolitical aspects of class struggles, political movements, and class consciousness. Fourth, dependency is viewed as an open-ended process. Despite a similar dependency structure in most third world states, the consequences will be different through the influence of intervening internal factors. Finally, Cardoso rejected Frank’s statement that development is incompatible with dependence. Cardoso argued that capitalist development in the satellites is possible

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but is limited to “dependent capitalist development” or “associated dependent development.” In his view, changes in international capitalist organization produce a new international division of labor. The driving force behind these changes is the multinational corporation. Cardoso stated that to some extent, the interests of foreign corporations become compatible with the internal prosperity of dependent countries. In this sense, they help promote development. . . . Today, the massive investment of foreign capital aimed at manufacturing and selling consumer goods to the growing urban middle and upper classes is consistent with, and indeed dependent upon, fairly rapid economic growth in at least some crucial sectors of the dependent country. (Cardoso 1973: 149)

However, development remains associated with dependency; development in this situation also depends on technological, financial, organizational, and market connections that only multinational corporations can ensure. Moreover, this path of development entails costs; it generates income inequality and foreign indebtedness and emphasizes luxury consumer durables as opposed to basic necessities (Cardoso 1973: 149). Associated-dependent development is not without dynamism, as it does not reinforce the old division of labor in which some states only exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods. Part of the industrial system of the hegemonic states is now transferred, under the control of international corporations, to states that have already been able to reach a relatively advanced level of industrial development. Cardoso called this process the “internationalization of the internal market,” which stands in contrast to the previous stage of import substitution industrialization (Cardoso 1973: 156–157). The local bourgeoisie internationalizes and adapts to the beat of international capitalist development, thereby establishing an effective subordination of the national economy to the international economic system. An agreement is reached between the bourgeoisie and the state. The former has momentarily relinquished its political-control instruments (party system, elections, freedom of the press), and in the trade-off, the state has mushroomed, particularly with respect to the regulation of economic life. Cardoso explained that in the process the military implicitly assumed an identity between the economic interests of the entrepreneurs and the general interests of the nation. . . . The system does have considerable social costs, but it has also opened up the very promising opportunities for the absorption of the modern sectors of the middle classes, linking them through self-interest to the international bourgeoisie. This is an important political fact. (Cardoso 1973: 159–160)

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The middle classes and the military benefit from the model of associateddependent development, and they protect the existing economic and political situation. In short, in such situations of dependent capitalist development, the regime is nondemocratic and its mode of organization is military-bureaucratic. Although the higher level of development generated a growing middle class, this middle class supports the actual state of political affairs, that is, the nondemocratic regime. In a dependent-developed state, the middle class will not advocate a transition to a democratic regime. Guillermo O’Donnell agreed with Cardoso by emphasizing that although dependency does not always lead to underdevelopment, it creates pressures toward nondemocratic rule. During the 1960s, several Latin American states (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) turned to nondemocratic regimes, and O’Donnell contributed by developing an explanation of the emergence of these new nondemocratic regimes, the so-called bureaucraticauthoritarian (BA) states (O’Donnell 1979). O’Donnell first noticed that in Latin America in the early 1970s, the higher and lower levels of modernization were associated with nondemocratic political systems, while political democracies were found at the intermediate levels of modernization (O’Donnell 1979: 85–91). Why did authoritarian states emerge at this modernization level? According to O’Donnell, the BA state was a response to the failure of the policy of import substitution. Import substitution industrialization (ISI) had expanded the urban middle and working classes, brought populist coalitions to power, and included labor and popular organizations in the political process. However, this ISI strategy ran into trouble when both prices and demand for Latin America’s primary exports on the international market declined in the 1950s. The balance-of-payments problems caused domestic inflation, declining GNP and investment rates, negative redistribution of income, and so on. These economic problems led to political protests in the popular sector, which asked for higher wages and lower inflation. The BA state was a product of these economic and political crises, O’Donnell argued. The military and civilian elites and bourgeoisie wanted to try a new economic strategy aimed at “deepening of industrialization.” They saw democracy as incompatible with further economic development and installed BA regimes. In such a BA state, the top positions in the government are held by individuals who had previously occupied responsible posts in other bureaucratic institutions, such as the armed forces, private corporations, or public bureaucracy. Social and political questions are reduced to “technical” problems that can be solved by the bureaucracy, and popular groups are barred from access to the state apparatus (O’Donnell 1979). These BA regimes protected economic policymakers from popular pressures and deactivated labor unions, by corporatism or force. These rela-

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tively modernized Latin American states were hence not democratic, as expected by the modernization school, but they turned to authoritarianism because of their dependent position in the world economy.10 In short, Cardoso and O’Donnell modified Frank’s assumptions and introduced several original concepts like associated-dependent development and the bureaucratic-authoritarian state. The two authors acknowledged that two contradictory processes (dependency and development) can coexist. More economic dependency does not necessarily lead to less development; as a consequence, there is no expected relationship between economic dependency and development. More attention was paid to historically specific situations of dependency and to the role of middle classes. Despite the fact that dependency can lead to a higher level of development, it was nevertheless argued that dependency generates nondemocratic regimes. In conclusion, the following hypotheses can be derived from the theoretical ideas of the modified dependency approach as described above: 12. There is no relationship between economic dependency and development. 13. In dependent-developed states, there is a negative relationship between the size of the middle class and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy. 14. There is a negative direct relationship between economic dependency and the chance that a state makes a transition to democracy. World-System Approach

The world-system school can be viewed as the younger sibling of the dependency school. It tried to offer a new interpretation of the events in the 1970s, such as the East Asian industrialization, the crisis of socialist states, and the so-called decline of the capitalist world economy. The school started with Immanuel Wallerstein’s publications in 1974, for example the first volume of The Modern World-System, which were immediate successes. In 1977, Wallerstein had already begun to edit his own journal, Review, and the following year a special section of the American Sociological Association published an annual volume on the political economy of the world-system. World-system researchers started to develop new, worldlevel data sets, because the current data sets, most of which had been collected at the national level, were insufficient to answer the global research questions posed by the world-system theorists. The Research Working Group on World Labor (RWG) of the Fernand Braudel Centre collected data and conducted content analysis of magazines, almanacs, and newspa-

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pers from 1870 to the present in order to extract information on global labor movements. Within a few years, a new school had been established. Wallerstein started as a specialist on Africa and published studies of developmental problems after Africa’s independence (Wallerstein 1961). Consequently, he was strongly influenced by the dependency school. In fact, he has included many concepts developed by Frank and other dependency theorists: concepts such as unequal change, the world market, coreperiphery exploitation, and international division of labor. In addition, Wallerstein was influenced by Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school. The Annales school protested against the overspecialization of social science disciplines within conventional academic boundaries. Braudel wanted to develop “total” or “global” history, using a multidisciplinary approach. He argued for the synthesis of history and social sciences through an emphasis on la longue durée, the long-term process. The longue durée is a historical process in which history means repetition and all change is slow and cyclical. In that way, history would move away from eventism, and the social sciences would gain a historical perspective. Finally, Braudel wanted to ask “big” questions, like “what is capitalism?” and “how did Europe become dominant in the world?” Adopting elements from the dependency approach and Annales school, Wallerstein took a holistic view and historical perspective that extend back to the establishment of the world-system in the sixteenth century. In this capitalist world-system, states are not societies with separate, parallel histories but parts of a whole, reflecting that whole. To the extent that stages exist, they exist for the system as a whole and to understand the internal class contradictions and political struggles of a particular state, we must first situate it in the world-economy. We can then understand the ways in which various political and cultural thrusts may be efforts to alter or preserve a position within this world-economy which is to the advantage or disadvantage of particular groups located within a particular state. (Wallerstein 1993: 221)

Leaving aside small-scale, isolated societies, there have been only two kinds of large-scale social systems: (1) empires, in which a functional occupational, economic division of labor is subsumed under one imperial state, and (2) world economies, in which there are multiple political sovereignties, no one of which can subsume and control the entire economic system. A world economy should be, Wallerstein argued, more able than a world empire to experience sustained economic development because economic actors have more freedom to maneuver and reinvest surpluses. The world economy is based upon a geographically differentiated division of labor and divided into three main zones—the core, periphery, and

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the semiperiphery. Each major zone has an economic structure based upon its particular mixture of economic activities (industry and differentiated agriculture in the core, and monoculture in the periphery) and its form of labor control (skilled wage labor in the core, sharecropping in the semiperiphery, and slavery or “coerced cash-crop labor” in the periphery). The different zones are differentially rewarded by the world economy, with surplus flowing disproportionately to the core areas. The core societies are rich, powerful, economically diversified, and relatively independent of outside controls. The peripheral societies are relatively poor, weak, economically overspecialized, and subject to manipulation and control by the core states. The semiperipheral societies stand between the core and periphery and are trying to industrialize and diversify their economies. Wallerstein’s version of the dependency theory has several important original elements (see also Wallerstein 1984). First, he stressed the importance of a world-system, which is a single economic exchange network. The world-system perspective insists that the whole world should be taken as the unit of analysis. Unlike the dependency school, which concentrates on the study of the periphery, the world-system school has a much broader research focus in studying the whole world-system. Second, Wallerstein stated that there was initially only a small difference in economic and social development between the capitalist core and the periphery. By exploiting the difference (buying cheap primary products in return for manufactured products), the Low Countries enlarged that difference in the sixteenth century, he argued. Third, he proposed the trimodal system consisting of core, semiperiphery, and periphery, reasoning that the world is too complicated to be classified as a bimodal system, as the dependency theorists do. He argued that the world-system needs a semiperipheral area because a polarized world-system can lead rapidly to acute disintegration. Crises are avoided by creating middle sectors, which tend to think they are better off than the lower sector, not poorer than the upper sector. In addition, semiperipheral states can serve as good places for capitalist investment when well-organized labor forces in core economies cause wages to rise too fast. Fourth, Wallerstein’s trimodal model avoids the deterministic statement of the dependency school that the core always exploits the periphery. With the semiperipheral concept, the possible direction of development can be upward and downward in the world economy. Finally, Wallerstein turned the Marxist concept of class conflict into a matter of international conflict, with the core as upper class, the semiperiphery as middle class, and the periphery as working class. Internal class structures are adjuncts of the international division of labor and could explain the performance of individual states in the international game.

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Socialist revolution would occur only when the periphery overthrew the core and established a socialist world-system free of exploitation (see Chirot 1981: 273–274). According to Wallerstein, an important difference between the modernization school and his approach is the mode of thought: the modernization approach is mechanical, whereas the world-system approach is dialectical. I mean by the latter term that at every point in the analysis, one asks not what is the formal structure but what is the consequence for both the whole and the parts for maintaining or changing a certain structure at that particular point in time, given the totality of particular positions of that particular point in time. (Wallerstein 1993: 221)

Although a considerable number of critical remarks can be made, the insights of the world-system school are valuable in explaining democracy.11 Semiperipheral and peripheral positions in the world-system are thought to reduce a state’s probability for political democracy, but this hypothesis has been neglected in empirical research. Only Kenneth Bollen (1983) analyzed the relationship between a state’s position in the worldsystem and the existence of a democratic system in a quantitative study.12 Bollen discussed the mechanisms by which world-system position influences the likelihood of democracy. Modernization theorists view socioeconomic development as giving rise to a number of powerful groups (e.g., the middle class) that successfully challenge traditional elites to obtain a more democratic system. World-system theorists argue that a group such as the middle class does not play the same role in the noncore as it does in the core. Those theorists state that the middle class is extremely weak in the noncore because of the alliance between the noncore and core elites. The landowning classes and the merchants join together to promote the export of raw materials and the import of manufacturing products, and as a result they undermine the domestic industrial bourgeoisie and middle-class (Chase-Dunn 1975). As a consequence, the effect is, as Chirot states, that “outside the core, democracy is a rarity” (quoted in Bollen 1983: 470–471). Democracy is more likely in the core than in the peripheral states (see also Chase-Dunn 1998: 123–130). One reason for this is that, according to Bollen, a number of groups in the core states are sufficiently strong to demand and receive some say in the national government. To maintain domestic stability within the core, it is necessary to distribute political power more equally than might otherwise be desired by the core’s elite (Bollen 1983: 470–471). Bollen also undertook a regression analysis of the relations among world-system position, economic development, and democracy. The results supported the idea that different positions in the world-system are associat-

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ed with different levels of democracy, even after controlling for economic development. Both peripheral and semiperipheral states are less democratic than core states. Peripheral position has a larger negative effect than does the semiperipheral position. The analysis indicated a persistent positive relationship between economic development and democracy. Finally, Bollen suggested there may be indirect effects of position in the world-system on democracy. Economic development increases the likelihood of democracy. If dependency depresses economic development, then indirectly it will reduce democracy. It should be noted that Bollen did not test the influence of dependency on development or the possibility of indirect effects, although “these indirect influences may be just as (or more) important than the direct effects in this analysis. It remains for future research to determine this” (Bollen 1983: 478). In conclusion, the following hypotheses evolve from the theoretical ideas of the modified dependency approach as described above: 15. Semiperipheral and peripheral states have a lower probability to be democratic than states in the core. 16. States in the semiperiphery and periphery have a lower probability to make the transition to democracy than core states. 17. There is an indirect relationship between a state’s role in the world-system and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. States in the semiperiphery and periphery of the world-system have a weaker middle class than a state in the core of the world-system. In addition, a weaker middle class decreases the probability of a transition to democracy. 18. There is an indirect relationship between a state’s role in the world-system and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with dependency and development being the intervening variables. A state in the periphery of the world-system has a higher level of economic dependency and a lower level of development than a state in the core. In addition, a higher level of economic dependency and a lower level of development decrease the probability of a transition to democracy.

The Historical-Structural Approach

At the same time the dependency school was emerging, the historical-structural approach began to explore and look for explanations of democratization. This new approach stated that structures of power constrain and determine the behavior and activities of individuals. The opportunities of

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political elites to choose a particular type of political regime are restricted by certain structures. Particular relationships of certain structures of power, not the choices of elites, historically lead in other political directions. The structures are enduring, although they gradually change over time because they are influenced by individuals and by events. This approach uses a historical method and studies only a few states during a long period, sometimes even centuries. Much attention is paid to the historical genesis of political and social structures and developments, long-term historical developments in different parts of the world, and the historical particularity of certain states. Quantitative research and statistical techniques are avoided and even criticized. Barrington Moore, a historicalstructural theorist, attacked the influence of the behavioral revolution, the emphasis on statistics in most research, and the limitations of statistical methods. On the other hand, he emphasized support for quantitative research and concluded that “different perspectives on the same set of events should lead to complementary and congruent interpretations, not to contradictory ones” (Moore 1966: 522). Moore’s book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), can be considered a classic starting point of the historical-structural approach to democratization. Moore wanted to explain why during the gradual historical transformation between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries—when agrarian societies were changing to industrial states (modernization process)—some political regimes moved toward a democratic regime, others toward fascism, and some toward communism. He was skeptical of the thesis that industrialization was the main cause of one single type of political regime and explored alternative explanations (Moore 1966: viii). Changed relationships between class structures of power can, Moore stated, in various ways produce democracy, fascism, or communism. He compared the histories of states that traveled the paths to democracy (the United States, England, and France), fascism (Japan and Germany), and communism (Russia and China) in terms of the changing structures of power, that is, the changing relationships among landed upper class, the urban bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the state. Moore pointed out that the path to democracy is a complex one and that “a decisive precondition for modern democracy has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility, in which royal power predominated but left a substantial degree of independence to the nobility” (Moore 1966: 417). He emphasized that a strong bourgeoisie is of critical importance: “We may simply register strong agreement with the Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy. No bourgeois, no democracy” (Moore 1966: 418). He also noted that in

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all three cases of democratic development studies, there was a revolutionary break with the past led by the urban bourgeoisie, stopping the domination of state and lords.13 The second main route to the world of modern industry is what Moore called the path to fascism, exemplified by Germany and Japan. There, capitalism took hold quite firmly in both agriculture and industry and turned them into industrial states. But it did so without a popular revolutionary upheaval. In fascist dictatorships, there was a dominant coalition between a strong state and powerful landowning classes. The urban bourgeoisie was comparatively weak and depended on the support of the state through trade protectionism, favorable labor legislation, and other measures to promote commercialization of agriculture. Agriculture labor remained controlled by repressive means rather than through the market (Moore 1966: 433–452). Communist revolution, the third path, emerged in situations where the urban bourgeoisie was weak and dominated by the centralized state, the link between landlord and peasantry was weak, there was no commercialization of agriculture, the landowning class relied on political means of labor repression, and the peasantry was cohesive and found allies with organizational skills (Moore 1966: 453–483). In short, Moore argued that capitalism led to democracy but only under certain circumstances, namely under particular class structures. His structural-historical approach to democratization has often been criticized. An important shortcoming was Moore’s neglect of the role of the working class. His historical research was limited to the establishment of parliamentary competitive democracy with some civil liberties. This limitation followed from his definition of democracy, which focused on political competition rather than on inclusive participation in the political process. A problem then is that the role of the working class in the democratization process was fully neglected. It can be expected that the working class particularly had interests in promoting democracy, a political system with both competition and inclusiveness. A second shortcoming is Moore’s neglect of international and noneconomic explanations of democracy. He focused on the influence of internal, domestic explanations of democratization, neglecting the role of international and transnational relationships. The insights offered by dependency and world-system theories were not considered, whereas a state’s position in the world-systems, its dependency, and the international division of labor may be of crucial importance (see previous sections of this book).14 The more recent structural explanation by Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Stephens, and John Stephens in Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992) took these criticisms into account. Based on theoretical understanding and past historical and sociological research, the authors expected classes to be definite, central political factors in the struggle for

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democracy. Following Moore, they hypothesized that large landlords would be the most implacable opponents of democracy. However, in contrast to Moore, they also expected the bourgeoisie to oppose suffrage extension to the working classes, as such a move posed a potential treat to their interests. It was expected that the working class would be the most frequent proponent of the full extension of democratic rights; such an extension promised to include the working class in the polity where this class could further pursue its interests and could organize itself. The authors also hypothesized that the middle class would favor its own inclusion but would be ambivalent about further extensions of political rights, perhaps swinging to one side or the other on the basis of possible alliances (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 5–6, 57–63). The essential factor of class and class coalitions was complemented by two other power configurations: the structure, strength, and autonomy of the state apparatus and its relations with civil society and the impact of transnational power relations on both the balance of class power and statesociety relations. According to the authors, capitalist development furthers the growth of a civil society (the totality of social institutions and associations, both formal and informal, that are not strictly production-related or governmental or familial in character), which, in its turn, serves to change the balance of class power and establishes a counterweight to state power. Finally, the authors argued that international markets and transnational firms (that is, a state’s position in the world-system) influence in varying degree the internal balance of class power and affect states and state-society relations (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 63–75). Qualitative studies in three regions (Europe, Latin America, and Central America and the Caribbean) confirmed the importance of the three clusters of power for the development of democracy in the process of capitalist development. These three factors were expected to combine and interact in varying ways. The patterns found in each of the three regions under study were quite different, but the authors argued that “these differences were understandable in the context of the theoretical framework” (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 270). The authors concluded that capitalist development does encourage democracy because development transforms the class structure, thereby strengthening the working and middle classes and weakening the landed upper class. They reasoned that “it was not the capitalist market nor capitalists as the new dominant force, but rather the contradictions of capitalism that advanced the cause of democracy” (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 7). This historical-structural study conducted by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens had many achievements, mainly because it tried to combine several theoretical traditions.15 The study paid attention to both moderniza-

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tion and dependency theories; as an alternative, the authors developed an approach in which three clusters of power (class power, state power, and the transnational power structure) play key roles for the development (and demise) of democracy in the process of capitalist development. In summary, the most recent historical-structural study by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992) offered the understanding that not only is the influence of development important, but also the impact of economic international dependency and the class structure on democratic transitions and consolidation need to be taken into account. However, the study did not test the impact of these influences in broad quantitative analyses, and it was limited to only three regions in the world. Future research should pay attention to more states (e.g., the African continent) and test the influences in quantitative analyses.16 On the basis of the description above, the following historical-structural hypotheses can be formulated:17 19. There is a positive relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy. 20. There is an indirect relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. Development increases the size of the middle class and this class increases the probability that a state undergoes a transition to democracy. 21. There is an indirect relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. Development increases the size of the working class and this class increases the probability that a state undergoes a transition to democracy. 22. There is an indirect relationship between a state’s role in the world-system and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy, with class structure being the intervening variable. A state in the core of the world-system has larger working and middle classes than a state in the periphery of the world-system, and these larger classes generate a higher probability of a transition to democracy.

Conclusion and the Theoretical Model

The literature on the presence, rise, and endurance of political regimes offers many competing explanations. Over the past decades, different schools of research have dominated the field of democratization: modern-

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ization theories, dependency and world-system schools, the historicalstructural approach, and the actor-oriented approach. Chapter 1 and the previous sections of this chapter have made clear that these theories began under different historical contexts, were influenced by different theoretical traditions, offered different explanations and solutions to democratization questions, and used different methodologies. Table 4.1 presents a compact and simplified overview of the different approaches. The information in Table 4.1 suggests that one of the most important controversies is apparently the choice of crucial explanatory variables. Modernization theories focus on the influence of socioeconomic development; dependency and world-system theories concentrate on the international division of labor and economic dependency; the historical-structural approach emphasizes the changing structures of class; and finally, the actor-oriented approach focuses on actions of political elites. Until the early 1990s, controversies between the theories were not discussed and the seeming contradictions of the choice of important factors endured. The theories simply ignored one another, there was hardly debate, and the theories survived and lived peacefully side by side. For example, in 1966, Moore made no reference to Lipset’s work of 1960. Dankwart Rustow cited Lipset in 1970 but made only one reference to Moore. In the second edition of Political Man (1983), Lipset referred in one section to Rustow’s ideas but did not mention Moore’s research. Consequently, there was hardly any theoretical convergence, there was no cooperation between various paradigms, and there was no real debate. More recently, some authors have used insights of different approaches in a single study (e.g., Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Huntington 1991), although theoretical convergence has remained limited and selective.18 Some recent studies tend to mix a whole set of factors, including actorbased ones such as political leadership, which can contribute to processes of democratization (see Huntington 1991; Lipset 1993; Diamond et al. 1995). Thus far, however, no systematic selection has been made, which is deplorable because only a systematic comparative study can determine whether a specific explanation is generally applicable and which influence has the most explanatory power. In addition, it is unfortunate that the hypotheses offered by the dependency and world-system school are generally neglected in quantitative empirical studies. This omission is especially distressing because it bears on the debate about the relative importance of internal versus external influences on democracy. Modernization theorists argue that economic development, an internal characteristic, increases the chances of democracy (Lerner 1958; Lipset 1959; Huntington 1991). Dependency and world-system theorists suggest, however, that economic dependency or position in the world-system, both external factors, may be more important influences

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Table 4.1

Overview of Different Theoretical Approaches of Democratization Classical Modernization Theories

Research focus

Third world development

Theoretical history

Evolutionary and functionalist theories

Level of analysis Nation-state (as independent “billiard balls”) Methodology Typology construction, high-level abstraction, focus on process of development Key variables Internal factor of economic development central, and relative neglect of external factors and conflict

New Modernization Theories Third world development

Radical Dependency Theories

Third world development, but focus on periphery Evolutionary Reaction on and modernization functionalist school and theories, but ECLA modified program Nation-state Nation-state (as (as dependent independent elements in “billiard capitalist balls”) system) High-level High-level abstraction, abstraction, but sometimes focus on case studies general process and historical of dependency analysis

“Modified” Dependency Theories Development of the world (core, semiperiphery, periphery) Reaction on modernization school and ECLA program Nation-state (as dependent elements in capitalist system) Historicalstructural, focus on concrete situation of dependency

Emphasis on Emphasis on External but also internal external internal factors economic factors: (class conflict, factors, but colonialism, role of the more attention unequal state) to external and change, intervening trade variables (diffusion and class structure) Key concepts Tradition Tradition Core versus Core versus versus versus periphery, periphery, modernity, modernity, dependency dependency development development Direction of Optimistic view, Optimistic view, Pessimistic Generally development/ unidirectional multidirectional view, pessimistic, but democratization path toward paths of dependency dependency and Western model development leads only to development can underdevelcoexist, leading to opment BA states and authoritarianism Policy Modernization Modernization Dependency is Dependency is implications is beneficial, is beneficial, harmful to harmful to more Western more Western development, development, fewer linkages are linkages are fewer core core linkages are needed needed linkages are needed, but needed, socialist modified revolution (continues)

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continued

World-System Approach Research focus

Historical-Structural Approach

Development of the world (core, semiperiphery, periphery) Theoretical history Neo-Marxist and dependency school

Development and paths of fascist, communist, and democratic states Marxism and history

Level of analysis

World-system

Nation-state

Methodology

Historical dynamics Historical-structural, of the world system: comparison of cases cyclical rhythms and trends

Key variables

International division of labor, position in the world-system, core versus semiperiphery versus periphery

Key concepts

Core versus Class structure semiperiphery versus and alliances periphery “Neutral” view, Generally pessimistic, possible upward because and downward democratization mobility in the is determined by world economy structural factors

Direction of development/ democratization

Policy implications Revolution and introduction of more equitable economic order

Internal (development, class structure, civil society) and external (dependency)

Strengthening civil society and more economic development are beneficial for democracy

Actor-Oriented Approach (see Chapter 1) Process of transitions and focus on political elites Reaction on previous structural approaches Nation-state and its political elites Historical, mainly descriptive, concrete case studies of states that made a transition to democracy Political elites (hardliners, softliners, moderates, radicals) and their actions, choices, and strategies before and during the transition Agents and alliances of elites Uncertain or optimistic: democratization contingent on what elites do when, where and how Influencing the choices of elites before and during transition process

on democracy than economic development (Cardoso 1973; Kaufman et al. 1975: 306–309; O’Donnell 1979). Only an empirical study, in which not only the modernization hypotheses but also the dependency and world-system hypotheses are tested, can help determine the relative importance of internal and external factors.

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It is not necessary to make an either-or choice between the impact of internal influences such as development and external influences such as international economic dependency. Moreover, a factor such as class structure is considered an important intervening variable by several theories. Such an intervening variable can easily serve as a link to connect the different approaches. The influencing factors as mentioned by different schools of thought do not compete but complement one another. Although the choice of crucial explanatory variables seemed one of the most important controversies of all theories at first sight, it became clear that these variables could enrich each other. On the basis of the above considerations and the hypotheses formulated in the previous sections, a theoretical model can be constructed (see Figure 4.1). This model, which will serve as a reference point in determining the empirical impact of all variables mentioned in the present study, shows that the different influences expected do not contradict but complement each other.19 Figure 4.1 Explaining Transitions to Democracy: A Theoretical Model

World-system role

Economic dependency

Development

Class structure

Democratic diffusion

Transition to democracy

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In the following chapters, the primary goal is to describe and analyze systematically the influence of the main explanatory structural variables mentioned by the theories, that is, development, economic dependency, world-system role, class structure, and democratic diffusion. An analysis of the influence of these structural factors is very important, because it has not yet been done in a systematic way in order to explain transitions to democracy. Another innovation of this study is the fact that the period since 1989 will be taken into account. Previous quantitative studies focus on the period before 1989, but it is interesting to investigate whether the structural influences are also important in explaining the recent transitions to democratic regimes after the end of the Cold War. The next chapters discuss the structural variables separately, dealing with operationalization, previous empirical research, the formulation and tests of hypotheses, and the determination of their impact. Finally, the structural factors are combined within a single generalized model in order to identify their relative strength in explaining the rise of democratic regimes.

Notes 1. It was decided to exclude the strand of research focusing on the “political culture” approach, which emphasizes how cross-national differences in trust toward the regime and its institutions are related to support for, and satisfaction with, the political system and its democratic institutions. Theories of postmaterialism and, more recently, postmodernization suggest that a deep-rooted process of value change is gradually transforming citizens’ relationship toward government (Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997). In this view, attitudes such as personal trust and positive feelings about life are personal characteristics that create a positive individual outlook on the community and the political system. This contributes to optimism about one’s ability to participate in and have an impact on the political system (see Almond and Verba 1963; Inglehart 1990, 1997). These values develop through social interaction in the home, schools, and community and are associated with the “democratic citizen,” an individual who is critical of the government but is satisfied with how the system works (Dahl 1994). Inglehart (1990, 1997) found that interpersonal trust was indeed strongly related with economic development and democracy. There are two main reasons, however, why this factor is not included here. The first is that, in my view, the political culture approach is better suited to explain the functioning of democracies—or the consolidation of democratic regimes, democratic performance, stability of democracy, and support for democracy in already established democracies. This approach is clearly not focused on explaining transitions from nondemocratic regimes to democracy. This can be concluded not only on the basis of the theoretical descriptions of Almond, Verba, Banfield, Inglehart, and many others who focus on how democracies function, not on transitions to democracy, but also on the basis of empirical studies that include this factor (these studies focus on established democracies and do not compare the impact of political culture in countries that remained nondemocratic with countries that made a transition to democracy). The second reason is that the effect of political culture cannot be well

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measured. One could try to measure the “level of interpersonal trust” by using, for example, the surveys of the Afrobarometer, Eurobarometer, New Europe Barometer, Latinobarometro, or East Asia Barometer. These surveys all include questions like “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you must be very careful in dealing with people?” The biggest problem, however, is that data for the countries in my study are not available; the surveys have generally been done in already democratic countries. The barometer questions are not asked in nondemocratic countries or in countries just before they made a transition to democracy. Therefore, I cannot investigate this factor’s effect on the probability that a nondemocratic country makes a transition to democracy. 2. Hence, it is not surprising that modernization theorists are accused of being ethnocentric. In the modernization literature, modernization is simply a process of Europeanization or Americanization. Since Western Europe and the United States are viewed as having the most advanced, industrialized, and democratic states in the world, they have become the models that latecomers would like to follow. Social, economic, and cultural penetration by the modern West into traditional societies is desirable to promote modernization. The West “diffuses knowledge, skills, organization, values, technology and capital to a poor nation, until over time, its society, culture and personnel become variants of that which makes the Atlantic community economically successful” (Taylor 1979: 5). 3. This indicates that the criteria for Latin American states were less stringent. “Where in Europe we look for stable democracies, in South America we look for countries which have not had fairly constant dictatorial rule” (Lipset 1959: 74). 4. Economic development is also conducive to democracy, with an increasing level of education being an intervening variable. Lipset explained that “education presumably broadens men’s outlooks, enables them to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains them from adhering to extremist and monistic doctrines, and increases their capacity to make rational electoral choices” (Lipset 1959: 79). In short, the higher the level of education, the more one is inclined to believe and support democratic values. In addition, development has a positive influence on democracy via a growing civil society, according to Lipset. Civic organizations are a source of countervailing power, inhibiting the state or any single major source of private power from dominating all political resources; they are a source of new opinions; they can be the means of communicating ideas, particularly opposition ideas, to a large section of the citizenry; they serve to train men in the skills of politics; and they can help increase the level of interest and participation in politics. (Lipset 1959: 84) 5. Lipset’s followers have pointed out that his study has many conceptual, methodological, and technical problems (see Cutright 1963; McCrone and Cnudde 1967; Olsen 1968; Jackman 1973; Bollen 1980, 1991; Diamond 1992). First, Lipset’s operationalization of democracy contained indicators of stability, and the criteria for Latin America were less stringent than for Europe. As a result, the less democratic European category (unstable democracies and dictatorships) overlapped conceptually with the more democratic Latin American category (democracies and unstable dictatorships). If Lipset had compared two distinct categories of Latin American democracies and European dictatorships, he would have found the latter had higher levels of economic development than the former. Second, his measurement of economic development was ad hoc. Although he used different indices, he neither combined them into a single index nor treated them as separate dimensions

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of modernization. Third, Lipset’s sample was limited to European, English-speaking, and Latin American states. Fourth, the analysis of data was static from a single time point, although it classified regimes on the basis of their experience over a long period of time (25 to 40 years). Fifth, Lipset made no use of measures of statistical association or statistical controls. He found that the means between the two regional groups were different, but this tells nothing about the strength of the association between the independent variables that were presumably responsible for the observed difference in democracy between the two groups. Sixth, the means between the two groups differed, yet the spread in the values on almost every indicator was so extreme that it would be very difficult to place a single state in either the democratic or nondemocratic category knowing, for example, only its score on the number of telephones. Finally, like other classical modernization theorists, Lipset assumed linearity, ignoring the possible negative impact that development at a certain middle level might have on the probability of democracy. 6. In Chapter 5, this theme will be treated more in depth. 7. Some studies go even further by expanding the number of important explanatory variables. For example, Diamond alone and with several other authors analyzed the influences of these factors that facilitate and obstruct democratic development: socioeconomic development, class structure, civil society, and international factors, along with political institutions, political leadership, and political culture. In the present study, I do not pay attention to all these factors, believing that the more “conventional” and central factors such as development, social structure, and international influences have not yet been sufficiently investigated in quantitative analyses. The other influences will have to be investigated in future research. 8. In addition, Huntington paid attention to the influence of new policies of external actors, such as the new attitude of the EC toward expanding its membership; the major shift in U.S. policies, beginning in 1974, toward the promotion of human rights; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s changes in policymaking (Huntington 1991: 85–100). He also emphasized the influence of changes in the doctrine and activities of the Catholic Church, manifested in the Second Vatican Council in 1963–1965, and the transformation of national churches from defenders of the status quo to opponents of authoritarian regimes (Huntington 1991: 72–85). 9. Chirot (1981) earlier made the same distinction between radical and modified dependency theories. In addition, Alvin So (1990) made the distinction in the classical and new modernization school on the one hand, and the radical and modified dependency approach on the other. Such separations may be considered artificial, but in my opinion they are useful, especially to discover order in the chaotic world of theories. In this way, it is easier to recognize developments in the field of democratization and to detect the most important variables. 10. In the long term, the BA state even has the capacity to transform into a democratic state. O’Donnell observed this paradox between the BA state and democracy and explained that when the BA state has promoted economic development, it is so successful that it has a chance to win democratic elections. 11. Considerable critique can be given on the world-system theories. Wallerstein often uses teleological argumentations to support his theory. Theda Skocpol explained Wallerstein’s shortcoming as follows: Repeatedly he argues that things at a certain time and place had to be a certain way in order to bring about later states or developments that accord (or seem to accord) with what his system model of the world capitalist economy requires or predicts. If the actual causal patterns suggested

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by historical accounts or historical-comparative analyses happen to correspond with the a posteriori reasoning, Wallerstein considers them to be adequately explained in terms of his model, which is, in turn, held to be supported historically. But if obvious pieces of historical evidence or typically asserted causal patterns do not fit, either they are not mentioned, or (more frequently) they are discussed, perhaps at length, only to be explained in ad hoc ways and/or treated as “accidental” in relation to the supposedly more fundamental connections emphasized by the world-system theory. (Skocpol 1993: 235) Moreover, Wallerstein’s world-system model is a blueprint with temporal categories (core, semiperiphery, periphery) that have been imposed on the reality and that can and should explain all events; the historical events are used to explain the capitalist world-system, but these historical events had to happen because the world-system required them to happen. No escape is possible. Everything fits in Wallerstein’s world-system. Due to this teleological argumentation and holistic view, the worldsystem school neglects historically specific development of separate states. Actual patterns and causal processes in history are neglected, so the world-system theory is in fact ahistorical. Unfortunately, what Wallerstein wanted to improve in the ahistorical mechanical blueprint model of the modernization school he was not able to do, and he reproduced old difficulties in new ways. In addition, and often as a consequence of these methodological problems, the world-system theory is criticized because of the lack of empirical explanatory strength (Chirot 1981: 277–278). 12. Bollen treated dependency and world-system theories as belonging to the same school. In the end, however, he tested only the relationship between a country’s position in the world-system and the existence of a democratic regime. He neglected to investigate the dependency hypotheses. 13. The path to democracy traveled by India was rather special, according to Moore. Most conditions on the democracy route were absent; for example, there was no strong bourgeoisie and no commercialization of agriculture. So India’s parliamentary democracy is an exceptional case (Moore 1966: 430–432). 14. An additional criticism is that the time periods for the different states varied considerably in length. While the cases of democratization were studied over very long periods, the discussion of the fascist path covered a shorter period of time. The study of the path to fascism that was traveled by Japan and Germany ended before World War II, ignoring the establishment of democratic systems in these states after the war. Finally, Moore’s method has been criticized as being economically deterministic and neglecting noneconomic factors, which may play a crucial role in democratization. Rothman (1970) stated that Moore saw actors inevitably moved by their economic interests toward a predetermined end, with politics, culture, and society all determined by economic forces. Moreover, he accused Moore of neglecting the importance of cultural factors. I do not fully agree with Rothman’s critical remarks; although Moore rejected the Parsonian assumption that the cultural factor is the starting point and an independent causal factor in its own right, he never denied the importance of cultural factors. Moore wrote: There is always an intervening variable, a filter, one might say, between people and an “objective” situation, made up from all sorts of wants, expectations, and other ideas derived from the past. This intervening variable, which it is convenient to call culture, screens out certain parts of the objective situation and emphasizes other parts. (Moore 1966: 485)

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Hence, he did not fully neglect culture but argued that “cultural values do not descend from heaven to influence the course of history” (Moore 1966: 486). He tried to explain where cultural factors come from and suggested they are determined by modernization and class structure; however, it is true he did not investigate empirically the (intervening) influence of cultural factors on the type of political regime. 15. Methodologically, the study also tried to combine two traditions of research: both qualitative historical and quantitative cross-national studies were involved. Up to now, these two traditions have come to quite different and contradictory results; they employed different research strategies and methods, so different that scholars in each camp often barely took notice of the other side. The authors tried to break through this impasse by building on the research of both traditions: they accepted the finding of quantitative studies that development and democracy are positively associated and tried to provide a qualitative theory to understand and explain this settled finding. To answer the criticism that only quantitative studies include enough cases to test generalizations, they included a broad range of cases that cover three regions: Europe, Latin America, and Central America and the Caribbean. In the end, however, Capitalist Development and Democracy remained “loyal” to the qualitative historical-structural approach. 16. Rueschemeyer’s study has some additional problems; most important, its model is very complex and not at all parsimonious. Herbert Kitschelt asked critically: Given the complexity of the variables Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens take into account, what is the analytical bite of their study? What events and trajectories of regime change does it rule out? . . . At times, one has the impression that Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens try to convert every contingency into a structural historical determinacy in order to exorcize the role of a process-oriented account of regime change. (Kitschelt 1992: 1031) 17. The hypotheses concerning the impact of civil society are not listed here, since civil society is not regarded as a structural factor (see Chapter 1). 18. An important exception is the study Democratic Experiments in Africa (Bratton and Van de Walle 1997), which combines actor-oriented and structural approaches but is limited to the African continent. 19. The choice of the type of comparative method, however, remains an important controversy (see Table 4.1). The variable-oriented method is widespread among modernization theorists who conduct highly abstract, quantitative crossnational studies that include all or most states. The radical dependency and worldsystem theories involve historical, holistic cross-national studies, while the historical-structural and modified dependency approaches focus mainly on a historical qualitative comparison of a limited number of cases. The research question in this study focuses on factors that may influence the transition to democracy and searches for generalizable explanations, so the method employed here will not be case oriented but variable oriented.

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5 Development

T

he previous chapter, in which the various theoretical approaches on democratization have been described and reviewed, indicated that the factor of development is the main driving force for democracy, according to both classical and new modernization theorists. These theorists argue that when the people of a state are more developed, they are more inclined to support a democratic system (see Lerner 1958; Lipset 1959; Huntington 1991; Inglehart 1997; Vanhanen 1997). A strong relationship between development and the probability that a state is democratic is expected (see the first and fifth hypotheses in Chapter 4). This chapter shows that those important hypotheses can indeed be replicated. All previous empirical studies have already strongly supported that a strong positive relationship exists between development and the presence of a democratic regime (e.g., Cutright 1963; McCrone and Cnudde 1967; Neubauer 1967; Olsen 1968; Jackman 1973; Coulter 1975; Bollen 1979, 1980, 1983, 1991; Bollen and Jackman 1985, 1989, 1995; Muller 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Inglehart 1988; Muller and Seligson 1994; Burkhart and Lewis-Beck 1994). This hypothesis will be tested, replicated, and supported again in this chapter. Despite this remarkable consensus, some important refinements and critical remarks need to be made. First, the older modernization theorists assume that a high level of per capita real income will contribute to a higher standard of living for the people in general. But economic development and general human development need not be the same. Recently, a refined understanding of modernization processes has led to a broader, socioeconomic definition of development. On the basis of hypothesis 6, which was derived from the new modernization approach, it is expected that a broader measurement of development, that is, human development, is more closely related to the probability that a state is democratic than a purely economic measure of development. 87

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Second, the assumption that the relationship between development and democracy is universal and hence valid for all states and during all periods in time is controversial. Classical modernization theorists expect that there is stability over time (hypothesis 3), while new modernization theorists expect that the relationship between development and democracy may vary over time and across waves of democratization (see hypothesis 8). These hypotheses have not yet been tested in empirical research. In addition, previous studies have not taken into account the period since 1989; it is important to investigate whether the relationship between development and democracy holds during this fourth wave of democratization. Third, on the basis of the strong relationship between development and the presence of democracy, modernization researchers often simply assume that more development has a strong impact on both the transition toward and endurance of democracy, without actually having investigated whether this assumption holds. Both classical and new modernization theorists expect a strong positive relationship between development and the probability that a state makes a transition to democracy (hypotheses 2 and 7). These three issues are examined here. 1 The conceptualization and measurement of development are treated in the second section. The third section includes a short overview of previous empirical studies, which shows there is indeed a strong relationship between development and democracy. Analysis in this chapter corroborates the positive association between the level of development and the probability that a state is democratic during the third and fourth waves of democratization; hypotheses 1 and 5 are thereby supported by my empirical research. Hence, both economic development (GNI per capita PPP) and human development (HDI) are related with democracy. The third section also shows that the explanatory strength of economic development is as strong as the explanatory strength of human development; thus hypothesis 6 is not supported. The fourth section shows that the explanatory strength of development has diminished since the end of the Cold War. Theoretically, it is argued that the effect of economic development on democracy is dependent on phases in world history and world politics. During Huntington’s so-called third wave of democratization (1976–1989), the modernization model became stronger and stronger. After the end of the Cold War, however, countries were part of a different world-system, with its own dynamics and with a weakening role of economic development for the swelling increase of democracy in the world. Empirically, I show that indeed the explanatory strength of the modernization thesis increased during the third wave of democratization (1976–1989) but has diminished since the end of the Cold War (1989–2000). These results contradict the assumption of universality and do not support hypothesis 3, which expects that the relationship between development and democracy is stable in strength over time. The

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findings support hypothesis 8: the relationship varies over time and across waves of democratization. The world has changed and the period after the Cold War asks for a new theory of democracy. In the fifth section it becomes clear that the modernization thesis is not very durable in explaining democratic transitions: the relationship is merely cross-sectional. While it is very easy to predict which states are democratic at a given point in time, it is more complex to predict those most likely to become democratic. As a consequence, hypotheses 2 and 7 are not supported in empirical research. In conclusion, the findings in this chapter set bounds to the explanatory power of development: the strength of the relationship between development and democracy has not been universal over time, and development does not generate transitions to democracy.

The Concept of Development

Economic development is a complicated concept in cross-national comparative research. In a certain sense, different kinds of development are important for different states. Irrigation is important in states with little or seasonal rainfall; transportation infrastructure has different meanings for states with mountainous conditions and for relatively flat states; and food production has different meanings in traditional Hindu and Muslim societies, in which the population does not eat, respectively, beef and pork. However, all human beings have similar needs and wants, and therefore some characteristics of development are generally recognized, such as high income levels, high literacy rates, and long life expectancy (Tisch and Wallace 1994: 18). Older modernization studies tended to focus on income in cross-country comparisons of development and democratic systems, mainly because, as was stated earlier, income is easier to measure than nonmonetary indicators such as literacy and life expectancy. Income is usually calculated from gross national income (GNI). GNI is the sum of value added by all resident producers, plus any product taxes (less subsidies) not included in the valuation of output, plus net receipts of primary income (compensation of employees and property income) from abroad. GNI per capita (formerly gross national product per capita or GNP per capita) is the gross national income divided by midyear population. Thus, expressing these magnitudes in terms of population averages results in per capita GNI. Lipset remained convinced that the gross national income per capita is the dominant explanatory variable “not only for all countries but also for those outside the industrialized world when considered separately” (Lipset 1995: 350). However, this purely economic measurement of development has a number of limitations: it does not always reflect the standard of living

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of the people in general and it may underestimate development in many developing states, where much economic activity is taking place in the informal economy. In addition, the mean gross national income of a state says nothing about its distribution. Kuwait’s GNI may be the highest in the world, and yet the standard of living of an “average” Kuwaiti may be not as high as that of an “average” American. Recently, new modernization theorists explain that the measurement of development must change the focus from development of the state (for example, measured by the gross national income per capita) to the development of the people on average (for example, measured by the level of education). It has been asserted that Lipset’s argumentation essentially focuses on the development of the people in general and not of the state (see Chapter 4). This understanding led to broader, nonmonetary types of measures that were expected to reflect better human development. A systematic attempt has been made to construct a more nonmonetary index of human development. In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) published a human development index (HDI), a new yardstick that provides a broad method by which interstate and intertemporal comparisons of living standards can be undertaken. The human development index comprises gross national income per capita, life expectancy at birth, and literacy rate, and it takes into account the following two facets: (1) actual achievement, and (2) a measure of deprivation, an index that “emphasizes the magnitude of the tasks that still lie ahead” (UNDP 1990: 14).2 Rankings of the same state could be different according to the HDI and GNI per capita index. For example, China, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania are ranked much higher in terms of the HDI than on a GNI per capita basis; on the other hand, in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia the HDI lags behind GNI per capita. Sri Lanka invested its limited income in social services and now enjoys high health and education standards, while the situation in the Middle East may be explained by the relatively explosive and recent petroleum incomes in these states (it takes longer to change levels of human development than it does to increase income). In short, theoretically it would be better not to operationalize the concept of development in exclusively economic terms. Empirically, on the other hand, both purely economic indicators (e.g., GNI per capita) and broader socioeconomic indicators of development (e.g., HDI, infant mortality, literacy, and life expectancy) can be considered a unidimensional representation of the variable of development. Factor analysis on several indicators of development results in the extraction of one meaningful factor, that is, GNI per capita. Moreover, it appears that human development (HDI) and economic development are strongly correlated (the Pearson’s correlation is 0.92 for the period 1976–2000). Incorporation of these two variables in one model will cause serious problems of multicollinearity, and both

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HDI and GNI seem to measure almost the same concept, that is, development. Przeworski and his collaborators also convincingly argued that per capita income is the best indicator of economic development (see Przeworski et al. 2000: 81). It does not seem necessary to reformulate the old modernization hypothesis in the newer one, and hypothesis 6 is not convincingly supported by these data. As a consequence, I use GNI per capita because it is highly correlated with other measurements of development, it is the best indicator, and because the data are easily available from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (1976–2000). All income figures are converted to international dollars using purchasing power parity rates. Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a method used to calculate exchange rates between the currencies of different countries. PPP exchange rates are used in international comparisons of standards of living. One calculates the relative value of currencies based on what those currencies will buy in their nation of origin. Typically, the prices of many goods will be considered and weighted according to their importance in the economy. The PPP method considers a bundle of goods, and then calculates the price of this bundle in each country, thereby using the country’s local currency. To calculate the exchange rate between two currencies, one takes the ratio of the prices. An international dollar has the same purchasing power that a U.S. dollar has in the United States. Note that the distribution of the gross national income per capita PPP (GNI per capita PPP) is a positively skewed distribution, and therefore it was transformed logarithmically into a new variable.3 The next section shows that economic development (GNI per capita PPP) is strongly related to democracy.4

Previous Empirical Research and Recent Replications

As described earlier, Lipset’s study has often been criticized (see Chapter 4, n. 5). Many sophisticated quantitative cross-national studies have nevertheless followed Lipset’s ideas. The quantitative studies have tested the relationship between economic development and the presence of a democratic political regime further and all have found a positive relationship (e.g., Cutright 1963; McCrone and Cnudde 1967; Neubauer 1967; Olsen 1968; Jackman 1973; Coulter 1975; Bollen 1979, 1980, 1983, 1991; Bollen and Jackman 1985, 1989, 1995; Muller 1988, 1995a, 1995b; Inglehart 1988; Muller and Seligson 1994; Burkhart and Lewis-Beck 1994).5 All these replications of the positive relationship between development and the presence of democracy are especially important and convincing because the various studies differed in so many ways. Overall, there are six differences between the studies: the measurements of democracy, the mea-

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surements of development, the sample of states that is analyzed, the period of investigation, the quantitative methods, and the other explanatory variables included in the sample. First, although the studies used the same definition of democracy, their actual measurements differed. The conceptualizations of democracy have been remarkably similar in relying on the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter (1976) and Robert Dahl (1971). However, the actual measurements of democracy have differed. Many studies have taken only Dahl’s dimension of competition into account and ignored the dimension of inclusiveness (see Bollen 1980, 1993; Gastil 1991; Jaggers and Gurr 1995; Alvarez et al. 1996; see also Chapter 2). As far as I can determine, only Dahl (1971), Arat (1991), Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang Reinicke (1991), and Vanhanen (1997) have collected data on inclusiveness. In addition, some measurements treated democracy and nondemocracy as a continuous variable (e.g., Cutright 1963; Jackman 1973; Bollen 1979, 1980, 1983, 1991; Vanhanen 1997), whereas others did not (e.g., Gasiorowski 1996; Przeworski and Limongi 1997a). The second difference between these quantitative studies is that they used different indicators and measures of economic development. While some applied a narrow measurement using gross national income per capita (Bollen and Jackman 1985; Lipset, Seong, and Torres 1993; Przeworski and Limongi 1997a, 1997b), others applied a more extensive measurement that contained such indicators as education, urbanization, and life expectancy (Cutright 1963; Olsen 1968; Diamond 1992). The studies indicate that democracy is related to both economic development and human development. Third, the studies that analyzed the relationship between development and democracy differed with respect to the sample of states. In some studies the sample of states contained all independent states (Olsen 1968; Vanhanen 1997); other studies focused on non-African states (e.g., Cutright 1963), noncommunist regimes (Jackman 1973), or all developing states (Arat 1991; Gasiorowksi 1996). Fourth, the studies all examined different points in time, with most focused on only one or two specific years (Bollen 1980, 1993; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Coppedge and Reinicke 1991). Others embodied a whole period, for example, from 1948 to 1984 (Arat 1991); since 1950 (Gasiorowksi 1996; Alvarez et al. 1996; Przeworski and Limongi 1997a; Przeworski et al. 2000); or from 1850 until the 1990s (Vanhanen 1997). Fifth, different quantitative methods were used in the studies that tested Lipset’s thesis. A number of scholars did cross-tabulations of economic development and democracy (e.g., Coleman 1965; Huntington 1991). Cutright’s 1963 study was the first to use correlational analysis to investigate the relationship. Many others have followed him and conducted corre-

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lation analyses (e.g., Neubauer 1967; Olsen 1968); multiple regression (Jackman 1973; Bollen and Jackman 1985; Lipset, Seong, and Torres 1993); or more sophisticated techniques such as logit, probit, or event history models (Gasiorowski 1996; Przeworski and Limongi 1997a). Finally and importantly, some researchers explored propositions derived from alternative theoretical views. Bollen (1983) and Lipset (1993), for example, included variables derived from the insights of dependency and world-system theories. Other researchers included variables such as cultural pluralism (Bollen and Jackman 1985), percentage of Protestants in a state (Bollen 1979, 1983), or military expenditure (Lipset et al. 1993). In short, the studies varied to a large extent in the kinds of other variables included in the analyses. There are thus many differences among the studies that have investigated the relationship between development and the presence of democratic regimes, and yet each has found a positive association between development and democracy. This long tradition of replication should be sufficient to convince researchers that the correlation between development and the presence of democracy has been a persistent finding in empirical studies. Even researchers belonging to the qualitative research tradition assume a relationship, arguing that the main finding of cross-national statistical work a positive, though not perfect, correlation between capitalist development and democracy—must stand as an accepted result. There is no way of explaining this robust finding, replicated in many studies of different designs, as the spurious effect of flawed methods. Any theory of democracy must come to terms with it. (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 4)

Before proceeding to the “buts” and challenges of this accepted relationship, I first present my own analyses and results that indeed support the convincing positive association between development and democracy. In order to replicate previous studies, it is necessary to have a sample that consists of all independent states in one point in time; in this section, I focus only on the year 1990. The analyses used in this study are cross-tabulations and logistic regression, and no additional variables are included. It is assumed these choices make no difference in replicating Lipset’s findings, because previous studies generated the same results, despite many differences. As an example of what others have found, we can look at the relationship between GNI per capita and democracy in 1990. Cross-tabulating four stages of development (running from lower-income to higher-income states) with the types of political regimes (democratic or not), I found that only two of the thirty lower-income states (7 percent) are democratic and 43 percent of the middle-income states are democratic; this percentage rises further from 73 percent to over 87 percent, in the group of states with the

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highest income (see Table 5.1). The classification of regime types in nondemocratic and democratic regimes fits perfectly within the expected pattern: the higher the income, the higher the percentage of democratic regimes. These results clearly show a positive association between development and the presence of democracy in 1990. Another technique that can be applied to analyze the same relationship between development and democracy with the same data is so-called logistic regression. Since the dependent variable is binary, linear regression is not appropriate to apply in these analyses, and hence logistic regression is used.6 In logistic regression, the probability of an event occurring (that is, democracy) can be estimated directly.

Table 5.1 Economic Development by Regime, 1990 Economic Development (X) and Regime (Y)

Lower Income

Nondemocratic regimes Democratic regimes Total

93 7 100% (N=30)

Middle Income 57 43 100% (N=30)

Upper-middle Income 27 73 100% (N=30)

Higher Income 13 87 100% (N=30)

Percentage nondemocratic regimes Percentage democratic regimes

Lower Income

Middle Income

Upper-middle Income

Higher Income

Note: Classification in four development groups is simply based on classification in quartiles. Four equal groups of development are created within each group, about 30 states. In this way, the cut-point for lower-income states is less than $1,362 GNI per capita, middle-income states have a GNI between $1,362 and $3,180 per capita, states between $3,180 and $9,865 GNI fall in the upper-middle-income group, and finally, states with more than $9,865 GNI are in the higher-income states.

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A first indication of the relationship between economic development (GNI per capita PPP) and the probability of the presence of a democratic regime in 1990 can be seen in Table 5.2, which reports the estimated coefficients (under column heading B). The positive sign on the coefficient of economic development implies that the corresponding independent variable increases the likelihood of the presence of a democratic regime in 1990. More than 77 percent of all cases have been correctly classified by this model. All of the diagnostic statistics indicate that there are no influential outliers, and the results can be considered robust. Figure 5.1, which is the plot of the logistic regression curve, shows the positive relation between economic development, measured by the log of GNI per capita PPP, and the probability that a regime is democratic in 1990. In conclusion, all findings in this section clearly support hypothesis 1: there is a significant and strong positive relationship between economic development and the probability of the presence of a democratic regime, at least in one point in time, that is, in 1990. Table 5.2

Economic Development and Democracy, 1990

Variable Economic development Constant N0, N1 –2 log likelihood Nagelkerke R2 % correct predictions

B

S.E.

Sig

Exp(B)

3.37 –11.69 57, 63 114.66 0.47 77.5%

0.60 2.11

< 0.0001

29.10

Figure 5.1 Relationship Between Economic Development and Probability of Democracy, 1990

Level of Economic Development

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First Challenge to Modernization Theory: Universality over Time

Does this powerful association between economic development and democracy, which has been replicated so often in empirical research, necessarily mean that the correlation between development and democracy must stand as an accepted result? Does the strong finding between economic development and democracy mean that this relationship occurs regardless of time or place, irrespective of whether it is during the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s, or after the Cold War during the 1990s? Classical modernization theorists assume that social change (e.g., development and democracy) is universal, moving societies from a primitive to an advanced stage. Rostow (1960, 1964), for example, argued that all traditional societies should follow the same path already traveled by more developed countries. This “universality assumption” that has been adopted from the evolutionary approach implies among others that the studied relationship between development and democracy is taken as universal (see also Vanhanen 1997: 69–70). It is, however, questionable whether this assumption is valid. Each period in world history is different, and it is possible that the impact of economic development fluctuates during each period. The most important distinction can be made between the Cold War and the post–Cold War period. On the basis of the arguments below, it is expected that the explanatory power of the modernization theory is more powerful during the Cold War than during the 1990s. Theoretical Expectations

After the end of the Cold War, the world changed, and other, completely different processes have been going on. The following three mechanisms explain why the modernization model is probably less powerful and why the relationship between economic development and democracy is expected to decrease after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first important mechanism is that the end of the Cold War, a new historical conjecture, offers the ruling hegemon the luxury to tolerate and even support democracies, regardless of the level of economic development. With the end of the Soviet Union as a superpower and the collapse of the Soviet-bloc communist states, the power of the United States and its wealthy democratic allies has increased enormously. Acting partly out of principle but also from the belief that more democratic political systems will generally produce better governance and more stable regimes (see Diamond 1997), the United States and the European Union have pressed for democracy in weaker states in which they exercise influence. Economic

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and political rewards have been offered for democratization, while attempts to overthrow democracy by military coups have often been punished by economic and political sanctions (see Diamond 1997). Substantial progress toward democratic rule has become a condition for economic assistance and aid. Not only leaders of donor states but also international organizations have attempted to promote democracy by “conditionality.” Poor states receive aid only if they adopt a democratic regime. The foreign policy of the United States and its allies has pushed many countries to adopt democratic policies. The second mechanism that is different in the post–Cold War period is that emulation of the democratic model is more likely. This argument holds that transitions to democracy should increase after democratic states win a major war and become very powerful, which is certainly the case in the 1990s: the United States and its democratic allies became the most dominant states in the world. Other, weaker states adopt democracy because they tend to emulate the most successful practices in the international system, and the democratic political model is perceived as highly successful, powerful, and prestigious. There is some overlap with the first mechanism, but the impetus for democracy is internal in this case (rather than external, as in the first mechanism). Hence, if democracies are victorious and powerful, other states are more likely to become democracies. The successful, powerful countries of the world lead the process of democratization by example or “emulation” (O’Loughlin et al. 1998). Diffusion by emulation is the process by which countries use information from other countries to reduce uncertainty associated with adopting democratic institutions. If clear examples of other more successful states adopting democratic institutions exist, the perceived costs of adoption become smaller, increasing the likelihood that democracy will spread. The diffusion of democracy during the 1990s has been mainly to countries where the internal socioeconomic factors are much weaker, which indicates that democratic states with high incomes might serve as states to be emulated. The third difference in the post–Cold War period is that a zeitgeist dominated the international scene, which possibly made the influence of domestic factors like development less important. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan note that “when a country is part of an international ideological community where democracy is only one of many strongly contested ideologies, the chance of transitioning and consolidating democracy is substantially less than if the spirit is one where democratic ideologies have no powerful contenders” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 74). In addition, the democratic “disease” may spread through contiguous contacts. The political changes in Eastern Europe since 1989 have clearly shown that countries are dependent on each other: once a democratic government had been installed in Poland, its neighboring countries fell like falling dominoes one by one to

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democratic types of regimes (see Starr 1991; O’Loughlin et al. 1998). In this period of democratic diffusion, internal developments may have less impact than during the Cold War. In short, the effect of economic development on democracy may depend on the context of world politics and history. While the explanatory power of the modernization theory is expected to increase during the Cold War, it will probably decrease in the post–Cold War period. Methodological Considerations

Some modernization theorists do not exclude the possibility that the relationship between development and democracy may vary over time and across waves of democratization (Huntington 1991). Previous studies, however, cannot give insight into the universality question because of certain methodological choices: they focus on one point in time, or they pool all points in time, or they investigate decennial data. In this section, I describe the consequences of these choices. First, many researchers examine the relationship between development and democracy at only one specific point in time, that is, for one or two specific years (see also my own analyses of 1990 in the previous section). Bollen’s important 1983 study, for example, investigates the impact of dependency and GNP on democracy in 1965, while Muller (1995a, 1995b) explores explanations of democracy in 1965 and 1980. While these authors did not aim to do so, a conclusion of universality can obviously not be drawn on the basis of purely cross-sectional studies in one particular year, without comparing this result with other years. Second, many studies apply cross-sectional, pooled time series. The points in time are treated as if they are essentially spatial: time disappears through the aggregation of all cases (temporally or spatially defined) into a single sample. Time is incorporated simply to solve other problems, that is, the problem of too many variables and too few cases (see Beck 1983). However, information has been lost in this manner; by aggregating time, the researcher gets no insight into the strength of the relationship between development and the probability that a regime is democratic over time. It remains obscure whether the strength between the two variables is the same in 1976, at the beginning of the third wave of democratization, as in 1989, at the beginning of the post–Cold War period in which many countries made the transition to democracy. The idea that development has always had the same influence on democracy in the 1980s and 1990s is simply assumed but not tested in empirical research. For example, in his 1997 study, which contains data until 1993, Vanhanen let time “disappear” through the aggregation of all cases (both countries and points in time) into a single sample. He merged all cases of all years, resulting in 1138 observa-

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tion units with which he tested the relationship between development and democracy (Vanhanen 1997: 68–70). Although he claimed that his research is longitudinal, time is clearly not present in its own right, as temporal variance. Also, the study by Przeworski and others is based on the assumption that the probabilities of (transitions to) democracy are constant over time and similar for each year (Przeworski et al. 2000: 90). In addition, Todd Landman (1999) pooled the 1972–1995 data for Latin America, yielding a total of 408 observations. Third, many researchers use decennial data. Although the use of decennial data is common practice in quantitative studies, there are some risks involved (see, e.g., Vanhanen 1984; Mousseau 2001; Ross 2001; Kurzman et al. 2002).7 There is no reason to assume that the 1960s, for example, is a stable period that can be investigated in one analysis. On the contrary, the beginning of the 1960s was a very hectic period, with decolonization and the installation of many new, independent countries with authoritarian regimes (see Chapter 3; cf. Doorenspleet 2000), while the end of the 1960s was a much calmer period. Also, as a second example of the danger of using decennial data, the 1970s was a turbulent decade, with no transitions to democracy at the beginning of the decade, but the start of the third wave of democratization after 1976 (Huntington 1991). Interestingly, they show that the results are not the same for each period. Clearly, a distinction between logical historical periods is more sophisticated than a simple division by decades. Nevertheless, by aggregating the years and investigating and comparing decennial data or specific periods with one another, important information about the processes within the decade or period is lost. Studies based on decennial data or periods have thus left significant annual fluctuations hidden. In short, the question whether the relationship between development and democracy is universal over time and holds during the more recent waves of democratization must be investigated in empirical research. Instead of doing cross-sectional, pooled time series, or cross-sectional analysis for one year or one particular period in time, I use another method: logistic regression analyses are conducted for each year separately. Methods

To estimate whether the relation between development and democracy changes over time, a method is needed that takes into account this specific behavior. A time-varying parameter regression model (VPR) is such a model (Beck 1983). These models make as few assumptions about the relationship as possible. The relationship between Y and the explanatory variables can change during every unit of time. Such a model can be represented as follows:

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y(t) = b0t(t) + b1tx(t) + b2tz(t) + εt,

(1)

where y(t) is the dependent variable at time t; x(t) and z(t) are two independent variables, b0t, b1t, and b2t are the coefficients of the model; and εt is an error term. Now, the relative influence of the independent variables can change over time. For every point in time there can be a different b. The interpretation of such models is clear. The impact of x and z on y may differ during time, and a priori, nothing is assumed about the relationship. Making few assumptions, however, often causes problems in estimating. As Beck stated, equation 1 requires the estimation of a separate regression for each time period (Beck 1983). When the coefficients are estimated for at least two different time periods, it is possible to test if they really differ. Then there are two regression models available on Ta and Tb that can be described as follows: T a: Tb :

y(t) = b0a(t) + b1ax(t) + b2az(t) + εa, y(t) = b0b(t) + b1bx(t) + b2bz(t) + εb,

(2) (3)

where the meaning of the variables is as in equation 1. The hypothesis that the coefficients do not change between the two points in time is: H 0:

b0a = b0b

and

b1a = b1b

and

b2a =b2b

(4)

A Chow test is the accepted way to test this hypothesis. The comparison is based on an F-ratio (Beck 1983). It is possible that the relation changes only slowly over time. Two extremely different values (e.g., a local minimum and maximum) of the coefficients must then be compared since the coefficient of two successive periods probably will not differ much. I apply a VPR model with Chow tests to investigate the hypothesis whether the relationship between development and democracy significantly changes over time and peaks at the end of the Cold War. Here I examine the period from 1976 to 2000, but rather than examining the period as a whole, I provide separate cross-sectional tests for each of the years so as to test whether economic development has different effects in different years or periods. Results

The results of these analyses, which are shown in Table 5.3, provide new insights into the relationship between economic development and democracy over time. For each year separately, the association between economic development and democracy is significant (