A historical puzzle: how core principles of modern democracy influenced the evolution of government budgets. Building on Dahl’s (1971) concept of polyarchy, the study links stages of electoral contestation and suffrage inclusion to distinct patterns of state spending.
Autocratic elite divisions are often seen as a key stepping stone toward democratic reform. This study shows that those divisions only spur liberalization under certain historical conditions: specifically, the origins of the ruling party.
This study asks whether mass mobilization’s ability to prompt transitions to democracy has been constant over time, and presents replication data and formal statistical models that examine how that effectiveness varied from 1900–2019. Using those models the authors report pronounced temporal heterogeneity in mobilization’s effect on democratization, with a positive significant association in a limited historical window but little or no detectable impact outside it.
This study examines how authoritarian legacies shape democratic party development through two channels: authoritarian successor parties and the degree of party institutionalization of both ruling and opposition parties from the autocratic era. The research asks how (1) the survival or reconfiguration of authoritarian actors into new parties and (2) the institutional strength of parties under autocracy affect party institutionalization after democratization.
Over the past three decades, competitive elections are linked to higher rates of forest loss. Forest protection is a long-term public good, while clearing provides short-term private benefits that can be delivered to targeted voters. In contested races, politicians appear to trade access to forested land—for small-scale farming or timber use—for electoral support, producing measurable increases in deforestation.
This paper asks whether the post–Cold War era is best described by Huntington’s ‘‘waves and ebbs’’ alternation of democratization and autocratization, or by a different dynamic. The author argues for a period of ‘‘regime convergence’’ in which both democracies and autocracies tend to shift toward hybrid regime forms, and presents empirical evidence covering 1990–2023 to assess that claim.
A novel dataset quantifies personnel transitional justice events from 1946 to 2016, measuring their severity during democratization periods. This research fills a gap by including both post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts. Unlike existing datasets, our approach disaggregates accountability measures temporally.
Many political science theories imply that relationships evolve over time, yet empirical work often ignores temporal heterogeneity or uses crude tests. Recent advances in change-point detection offer a better way to identify and characterize these shifts.
This paper examines the relationship between economic openness and democratic transitions across different nations. It explores how varying levels of free trade influence democratization processes in unexpected ways.
This research explores how elections in authoritarian systems can influence democratic transitions.