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Jan Teorell
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, 220pp., £18.99 (paperback), £58 (hardback), ISBN:
978-0521139687/978-0521199063
Jan Teorell's book comes closer than many others to providing plausible and sometimes intriguing answers to the often-studied question: Why countries around the globe democratized in the late twentieth century. He consciously engages in 'theoretical eclecticism' (p. 28) and tests - in separate Chapters (2-6) - social, economic and international determinants, as well as popular mobilization and authoritarian regime types. In several of these chapters, Teorell first performs large-N analyses on more than 160 countries over several decades in order to unravel patterns that hold across time and space, and then engages in within-case analyses in order to discern plausible causal mechanisms.
In Chapter 1, Teorell not only cogently summarizes the sometimes daunting variety of different - and as of now still unconnected - theories of democratization. He also makes a strong plea for a graded measure of democracy and, by virtue of that, democratization. He uses the usual suspects - Polity and Freedom House - but combines them into an index of democracy in an attempt to mitigate the well-known flaws of both democracy measures when used alone (p. 33). Teorell understands democratization as any upward movement (or, at least no downward movement, p. 32) of a country over time on his 10-point democracy scale - irrespective of whether movement occurs at the lower (non-democratic) or higher (democratic) end of the index. In order to better disentangle causal connections, Teorell distinguishes between short-run and long-run effects of his determinants, the former further divided into general effects, upturn effects and downturn effects. This represents an interesting and novel attempt at allowing for causal asymmetry, that is, the often plausible expectation that some factors foster democratization but are irrelevant for de-democratization and vice versa.
Not surprisingly, given the eclectic approach to testing theories in separate chapters, Teorell generates a long list of mutually non-exclusive findings, conveniently summarized on pp. 141-144. Some factors contribute to upturns (economic crises, peaceful mass demonstrations, democratic neighbors, democratic regional organizations), whereas others prevent downturns (socioeconomic modernization and economic freedom). There are several interesting non-findings. For...