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Abstract
How democracy is born matters. Built on the existing literature of transition, this paper examines the relationship between mode of transition and resultant democracy. Mass mobilization and regime continuity is used to identify the mode of transition. The relationship between mode of transition and quality of resultant democracy is tested in Repeated Measures Procedure of General Linear Model using approximately 60 out of 100 Third-Wave transition cases (1974-2004) in the countries with over-1-million-population. In those 60 cases, democracy has lasted 10 years or more. In addition to mode of transition, the quantitative model of this paper also includes political regions of the world as a between-subjects factor; level of development at the time of transition and ethnic fractionalization as covariates. The results of the Repeated Measures Model indicate that how democracy is born matters for the quality of resultant democracy. The mode of transition alone explains 15% of variation in the quality of democracy in the resultant democracy. The regime-defeated transitions produce the resultant democracy with approximately 2.8 FHI units better than regime-initiated transition in the first ten years since transition and 2.1 units better than compromise transitions. The marginal mean difference in quality of resultant democracy between regime-defeated transition, and regime-led transitions, the regime-defeated transition and the compromise transition are statistically significant at the level of 0.013 and 0.075 respectively.