Women's rights in democratic transitions: A global sequence analysis, 1900–2012

Abstract

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? This article explores the impact of granting civil rights in authoritarian regimes and especially the gendered aspect of this process. It argues that both men's and women's liberal rights are essential conditions for democratisation to take place: providing both women and men rights reduces an inequality that affects half of the population, thus increasing the costs of repression and enabling the formation of women's organising – historically important to spark protests in initial phases of democratisation. This argument is tested empirically using data that cover 173 countries over the years 1900–2012 and contain more nuanced measures than commonly used. Through novel sequence analysis methods, the results suggest that in order to gain electoral democracy a country first needs to furnish civil liberties to both women and men.

The Accountability Sequence: from De-Jure to De-Facto Constraints on Governments

“…A set of novel methods developed for political science from parasite-host systems analysis in biology (Lindenfors et al 2016(Lindenfors et al , 2018Wang et al 2017) makes it possible for the first time to describe long chains of sequential relationships between ordinal variables. We use the following two graphical investigation of the exact pathways for how variables change in relation to one another; and dependency analysis, exploring whether the values of one variable are systematically conditional on certain values of other variables.…”

Establishing Pathways to Democracy Using Domination Analysis

“…To identify the order of reforms during these episodes, we rely on methods adapted from evolutionary models for exploring the temporal relationship between two ordinal variables (Lindenfors et al 2018;Sillén-Tullberg 1993;used in Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg 2019;Wang et al 2017). Specifically, we analyze all possible combinations of values of all pairs of the 24 variables to establish which variables "dominate" other indicators (i.e.…”

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

“…These studies are nevertheless oriented towards explaining the timing of individual factors rather than longer chains of interdependent institutional reforms. Our approach to identifying a sample of democratization episodes, however, makes it possible to draw upon methods that borrow from genomics and evolutionary biology to differentiate and analyze processes associated with democratization (Lindenfors, Krusell & Lindberg, 2016;Lindenfors et al, 2018;Mechkova, Lührmann & Lindberg, 2018;Wang et al, 2017). Here, we briefly illustrate one way to use the variables that comprise the electoral democracy index to explore differences in successful and failed democratization episodes.…”