The Sources of Democratic Consolidation

How important are new constitutions for democratic consolidation? Lessons from the post-communist states

“…9 While the ten-year cutoff point is ultimately arbitrary, the threshold definition of stable democracy it facilitates has the potential advantage of greater analytical clarity and hence heuristic utility (namely easy portability) than the qualitative ordinal orientation that has been implicit in many studies to date. 10 It is consistent with Gerard Alexander's conception of 'consolidated democracies as ones in which nearly all actors have pro-democratic regime preferences that are highly unlikely to be reversed as a result of routine events', 11 as well as with Stephen Hanson's understanding of democratic consolidation as 'a stage in a larger dynamic process, rather than as a static endpoint'. 12 In this sense, the term 'consolidated democracy' 'should refer to expectations of regime continuity -and to nothing else'.…”

Moderation without Change: The Strategic Transformation of Sinn Féin and the IRA in Northern Ireland

“…Once the risks for republicans of political participation were reduced even further by bringing in the guarantees associated with power-sharing, this allowed for even greater engagement. In this way, the macro-institutional framework was able to channel dissent into political participation and prevent it from returning to a form of violent expression (Alexander 2002;Snyder 2000). CONCLUSION Irish republicanism offers important insights into a possible pathway to moderation for other radical separatist groups within a democracy.…”

Self-Enforcing Consititutions: With an Application to Democratic Stability in America's First Century

“…For example, in Chile during the early 1970s, many on the political right felt their economic rights threatened by President Salvador Allende's government, leading them to support the military coup (Valenzuela 1978). Similarly, during the Second Republic in Spain (1931-39), many agrarian landholders, elements of the Church, and many industrialists felt threatened by the democratically elected regime, leading them to support General Francisco Franco in the Civil War against the regime (Agüero 1995, Alexander 2002. In the early nineteenth century, large numbers of Southerners in the United States felt their property in slaves threatened by the newly elected Republicans in 1860, leading to secession and Civil War (Weingast 1998).…”