Which Democracies Will Last? Coups, Incumbent Takeovers, and the Dynamic of Democratic Consolidation

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Articles

I. Introduction

Which democracies are most likely to consolidate and which to break down? When does democratic consolidation occur, if at all? In addressing these and related questions, existing empirical research on democratic consolidation typically follows one of two strategies. We may call them the 'substantive' and 'prospective' approaches to democratic consolidation. The substantive approach focuses on a set of outcomes that we should observe in a consolidated democracy and then evaluates to what extent a democracy approximates them. Such desirable outcomes frequently include robust political competition, vibrant civil society, and widespread acceptance of key democratic tenets among the public and the elites.¹

The second, prospective approach primarily associates consolidation with the durability of democracy. According to Schedler, for instance, 'consolidating democracy means reducing the probability of its breakdown to the point where [we] can feel reasonably confident that democracy will persist.'²Empirically, questions about consolidation are addressed by examining what distinguishes democracies that achieve such durability from those that do not. In large-N research, this is frequently accomplished by specifying a temporal criterion that is used to identify consolidated democracies. Prominent examples of such criteria are Huntington's two-turnover test and Gasiorowski's twelve-year threshold.³

One difficulty associated with the first, substantive, approach to the study of democratic consolidation is the continuing disagreement about the outcomes that constitute its appropriate indicators.⁴In turn, why and even whether consolidation occurs remains contested, and the difference between plausible causes and consequences of consolidation is often unclear.⁵Meanwhile, one shortcoming of the second, prospective approach is that it presumes that consolidation indeed occurs. By specifying a particular criterion for consolidation - such as the two-turnover test - the prospective approach implicitly assumes that consolidation occurs by a particular time threshold. Yet whether and when consolidation occurs is disputed: Przeworski et al. and Epstein et al. do not find evidence of consolidation while Tilly asserts that 'democratization and de-democratization occur continuously, with no guarantee of an end point in either direction.' Whether and when consolidation occurs should therefore be an outcome that we investigate rather than assume at the outset of any analysis.⁶

In this article, I propose a new empirical approach to democratic consolidation that...