Dictators and Democrats

Masses, Elites, and Regime Change

Stephan Haggard, Robert R. Kaufman

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780691172156, 9780691172149
• eBook ISBN: 9781400882984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A rigorous and comprehensive account of recent democratic transitions around the world

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and post-Communist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? Dictators and Democrats takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman engage with theories of democratic change and advocate approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the authors argue that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change.

Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five reversions since 1980, Haggard and Kaufman show how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains.

Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, Dictators and Democrats explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.

PART I

Inequality and Transitions to Democracy

CHAPTER 1

Inequality and Transitions to Democracy

IN THIS CHAPTER, WE TAKE A FIRST CUT at the relationship between inequality, distributive conflict, and regime change during the Third Wave of democratic transitions from 1980 to 2008. As discussed in the Introduction, the new distributive conflict models that have recently been formalized by Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson give a sharper edge to structural, class-conflict approaches to political change that have long been a part of the social science canon.¹ They have done so in part by outlining the causal mechanisms that link inequality, struggles between elites and masses, and regime change, and we begin by outlining the underlying theory in more detail.

At first glance, these theories appear amenable to relatively straightforward quantitative tests, and we take up this task in Chapter 2. Are demands for democracy driven by discontent over the distribution of income and wealth? Are they blocked by elites at high levels of inequality? If so, we should find that transitions to democracy are more likely to occur in societies that are either relatively equal (Boix) or in ones that are at least not highly unequal (Acemoglu and Robinson). Transitions should be far less likely where income and assets are highly concentrated.

As we noted in the Introduction, however, reduced-form statistical models have difficulty capturing the complex strategic interactions that constitute the intervening causal processes in these theories. They therefore tend to focus on the structural components of the theory, such as level of development or inequality, and regime change. But the empirical question is not only whether antecedent conditions are linked to the outcome via an average treatment effect. We also want to know whether this causal relationship operates through the mechanisms stipulated in the theoretical model and, if so, in what share of the cases.

In this chapter, we outline and demonstrate a different empirical approach that we use throughout the volume. The approach rests on a three-step process of causal process observation: coding all cases for the presence or absence of the stipulated causal mechanism, which can be used in both econometric and qualitative tests; showing distributions of actual outcomes as opposed to average treatment effects or predicted values; and considering smaller samples of cases to buttress causal inference.²

Two features of case selection in our approach are somewhat unorthodox. First, we select on the dependent variable, choosing cases on the basis of whether or not they underwent a transition to democratic—o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Regime Change during the Third Wave: From Dictatorship to Democracy and Back
• Part I: Inequality and Transitions to Democracy
• Part II: Pathways to Democracy
• Part III: Reversions from Democratic Rule
• Conclusion: Whither Democracy?
• References
• Index