Successful and Failed Episodes of Democratization: Conceptualization, Identification, and Description

Abstract

* This paper is the result of a collaborative effort and authors are therefore listed in alphabetic order. Nonetheless, Laura Maxwell and Matthew C. Wilson deserve special credits for doing most of the data analyses and writing.

A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset

“…We base these minimal criteria on the six institutional guarantees for participation and contestation set forth by Dahl (1971). The upper part of Figure 1 illustrates democratization as an overarching concept for episodes that exhibit substantial and sustained improvement of democratic institutions and practices (Wilson et al, 2020). Conversely, the lower part of Figure 1 depicts autocratization as episodes that result in a sustained and substantial decline of democratic attributes (Lührmann and Lindberg, 2019).…”

“…Third, after experiencing substantial liberalization, the regime could revert back to lower levels of democracy (i.e. reverted liberalization, Wilson et al, 2020). Finally, for existing democracies that experience an ERT (i.e.…”

The Matthew effect in political science: head start and key reforms important for democratization

“…It does not include checks and balances or constraints on the executive, but focuses instead on features that enable citizens to formulate and signify their preferences and to have them weighted equally in deciding the outcome. We also use a classification scheme described in an earlier article to identify when movements towards democracy are occurring (Wilson et al, 2020). We define a liberalization episode as a period of time in which institutional changes take place that moves a country from a non-democratic state towards democracy by at least 10% of the possible range on the now leading measure of democracy-the Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) provided by the V-Dem data base (Coppedge et al, 2019).…”

“…We restricted our sample to episodes that began as closed or electoral autocracies to exclude positive changes in countries that were already electoral democracies. We used the classification of liberalization episodes into three groups -successful, failed and censored-developed by Wilson et al (2020). In that framework, an episode is classified as "successful" if it resulted in a transition to democracy (meaning it reached the threshold for an electoral democracy and held held free and fair "founding" elections, after which the winner was allowed to assume office); "failed" if it started a liberalization episode but did not reach these criteria; and "censored" if its outcome was indeterminate at the end of the period of analysis (it had not yet met the criteria for successful democratization, but also not yet failed).…”

“…In our analyses, we compared the liberalization phase of successful episodes with the equivalent phase in failed episodes. Based on these criteria, we identified 337 liberalization episodes in 155 countries from 1900 to 2018; 146 successful episodes in 110 countries, 182 failed episodes in 91 countries, and nine episodes that were still ongoing in 2018 and that therefore were classified as censored (Wilson et al, 2020).…”