What conditions provide fertile soil for democratic advancement?Are some nations endowed with traits conducive to democratization while others are doomed to a cycle of authoritarianism? These questions have been at the heart of a fifty-year quest to determine the basic preconditions for democracy. Modernization theorists have asserted the primacy of socioeconomic development while others have identified culture and religion, diversity, oil and natural resources, and diffusion effects as factors that might advance or hinder a country's prospects for democratic change. Our understanding of democratization is, however, far from complete.Unlike the majority of past studies, which assume that all nondemocratic nations face similar obstacles to democratization, we explore here institutional requisites for democracy. Are certain authoritarian regimes more likely to break down and, if so, are certain types more likely to democratize? Do the institutional attributes of the authoritarian regime affect a country's prospects for democratic transition?To answer these questions we develop a new typology of authoritarian regimes-based on Barbara Geddes's seminal contribution 1 -covering 191 countries in the world from 1972 to 2003. Our results show that different types of authoritarianism have different propensities for survival and for democratization. Hence an institutional attribute-the

In this article we probe the effect of democratization on the state's administrative capacity. Using time-series cross-section data, we find a curvilinear (J-shaped)

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