Under what conditions do democracies emerge and consolidate? Recent theories suggest that inequality is among the leading determinants of both democratization and consolidation. By contrast, this article argues that inequality harms consolidation but has no net effect on democratization. The author shows that the existing theories that link inequality to democratization suffer from serious limitations: (1) they are useful only for understanding transitions from below and thus do not apply to many other transitions (that is, those from above); (2) even for democratization from below, their predictions are unlikely to hold, since inequality actually has two opposite effects; and (3) they ignore collective action problems, which reduces their explanatory power. However, these objections do not affect the relationship between inequality and consolidation. In particular, while inequality has two opposite effects on the probability of transition to democracy, it unambiguously increases the probability of transition away from democracy. This article conducts the most comprehensive empirical test to date of the relationship between inequality and democracy. It finds no support for the main democratization theories. Contrary to what they predict, estimation suggests neither a monotonic negative nor an inverted U-shaped relationship. Yet inequality increases the probability of backsliding from democracy to dictatorship.

Does inequality between ethnic groups destabilize democracies? While the literature largely agrees that inequality harms democracies, previous studies typically focus on the overall level of inequality in a society, leaving unanswered questions about the effect of inequality between ethnic groups. This article fills this gap and argues that inequality between ethnic groups harms the consolidation of democracy but that its effect is strongest when inequality within groups is low. Using group- and country-level data from more than seventy-one democracies and 241 ethnic groups worldwide, the author conducts the first cross-national test to date of the effect of ethnic inequality on transitions away from democracy. Results provide support for the hypothesis: when within-ethnic-group inequality (WGI) is low, between-ethnic-group inequality (BGI) harms democracy, but when WGI is high, BGI has no discernable effect.

While populist rule has become increasingly prevalent in the developing world, much of our knowledge about its implications remains anecdotal and contradictory. In this article, we conduct the most comprehensive large-N cross-national test of the consequences of populist rule to date. Using data on 19 Latin American states, we find that populism’s implications are mostly negative: (1) populist regimes tend to erode institutional and legal constraints on executive authority; (2) participation rates are not higher under populist governments or for populist campaigners; and (3) populist rule, even under left-wing populists, is not associated with more redistribution than non-populist democratic rule. We perform instrumental variable estimations and a quasi-experimental analysis to address the potential endogeneity of populism.

Scholars, observing clustering in transitions to democracy, argue that democratization diffuses across borders as citizens in autocracies demand the same reforms they witness in neighboring states. We disagree. This article demonstrates that diffusion plays only a highly conditional role in democratization. We advance and test an alternative two-step theory of clustered democratization: (1) economic and international political shocks, which are clustered spatially and temporally, induce the breakdown of authoritarian regimes; then (2) democratic diffusion, in turn, influences whether a fallen dictatorship will be replaced by a democracy or a new autocracy. Diffusion, despite playing an important role, is insufficient to explain the clustering of transitions. Using data on 125 autocracies from 1875 to 2004, we show that economic crises trigger authoritarian breakdowns, while diffusion influences whether the new regime is democratic or authoritarian.

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