Latent Growth Curves Capture Long-Term Democratic Change Missed by Panels

Why Democratic Trajectories Matter

Aníbal Perez-Liñán and Scott Mainwaring ask how democracies evolve over time: do they deepen, stagnate, erode, or break down? Understanding these trajectories matters for predicting democratic consolidation and backsliding across the Third Wave of democratization and for designing policies that sustain democracy.

What Econometric Panels Overlook

The authors argue that standard econometric panel models — widely used in comparative politics — typically ignore cumulative, history-dependent effects. Many drivers of regime change, such as sustained economic growth or recurring crises, operate cumulatively and shape medium- to long-term trajectories in ways that single-period panel specifications do not capture.

A Better Tool: Latent Growth Curve Models

Perez-Liñán and Mainwaring propose latent growth curve models as an alternative. These models explicitly model each country's latent trajectory over time, allowing scholars to estimate both initial democratic status and the slope (pace and direction) of change while accounting for time-varying and time-invariant covariates that have cumulative impact.

What Perez-Liñán and Mainwaring Did

• Sample: 103 democratic regimes inaugurated after 1974 ( Third Wave cases ).
• Methods: Direct comparison between conventional panel estimators and latent growth curve models to assess which approach better captures observed regime trajectories.

Key Findings

• Conventional panel estimators often fail to predict long-term democratic trajectories because they omit cumulative processes.
• Latent growth curve models better capture cumulative effects and therefore provide a more accurate representation of whether democracies deepen, stagnate, erode, or collapse over time.
• The paper highlights economic growth as an example of a factor whose cumulative influence is central to explaining medium- and long-term regime trajectories.

Implications for Comparative Research

The study recommends that scholars interested in regime change and democratic consolidation treat cumulative dynamics as central and consider latent growth curve models when the research question concerns trajectories rather than static differences. This methodological shift has implications for how evidence about democratization and backsliding is generated and interpreted.