Why Democracies Develop and Decline

Michael Coppedge, Amanda B. Edgell, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781316514412
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009086158
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem) pioneered new ways to conceptualize and measure democracy, producing a multidimensional and disaggregated data set on democracy around the world that is now widely used by researchers, activists, and governments. Why Democracies Develop and Decline draws on this data to present a comprehensive overview and rigorous empirical tests of the factors that contribute to democratization and democratic decline, looking at economic, social, institutional, geographic, and international factors. It is the most authoritative and encompassing empirical analysis of the causes of democratization and reversals. The volume also proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework and presents an up-to-date description of global democratic developments from the French Revolution to the present. Each chapter leverages the specialized expertise of its authors, yet their sustained collaboration lends the book an unusually unified approach and a coherent theory and narrative.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Tables in Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• 1 V-Dem Reconsiders Democratization
• 2 The Ups and Downs of Democracy, 1789–2018
• 3 Long-Run Factors
• 4 International Influence: The Hidden Dimension
• 5 Economic Determinants
• 6 Political Institutions and Democracy
• 7 Democracy and Social Forces
• 8 Causal Sequences in Long„-Term„ Democratic Development and Decline
• Appendices
• Appendix 3 Variable Definitions
• Appendix 4.A Modeling Spatial Dependence
• Appendix 4.B Other Networks
• Appendix 4.C Estimation
• Appendix 4.D Descriptive Information
• Appendix 6.A Details on Variables and Analysis
• Appendix 6.B Cox Hazard Models
• Appendix 7 A Details of Measurement and Analysis
• Appendix 7 B Supplemental Tables and Figures
• Appendix 8 A Structural Equations
• Appendix 8 B Variable Descriptions
• Appendix 8 C Additional Path Models
• Bibliography