Autocratic transitions and democratization
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (Univ. of Essex & Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO) and Jinhee Lee Choung (University of California, San Diego)
Abstract: Autocratic regimes may be replaced by either new autocratic regimes or democratic regimes, but previous research has only looked at changes between democratic and non-democratic regimes where non-democracy is a residual category that lumps together both stable autocratic regimes and transitions between autocratic regimes. We develop hypotheses on when the fall of autocratic regimes will lead to new autocratic or democratic regimes, and devise a new approach to identifying changes between non-democratic regimes. We find that although domestic economic factors make autocratic regimes more likely to break down without influencing whether they will be followed by new autocracies or transitions to democracy, international factors and prior experiences with democracy make transitions to democracy much more likely in the wake of the fall of a dictatorship than the emergence of new autocracies.