What makes democracies collapse

The more unequal the income distribution, the poorer the median voter and thus the more confiscatory the tax rate can be expected to be in a democracy. In these models politicians are perfect agents of societal interests, and political leaders do not maximize their own revenue distinct from the revenue of the elite group they represent.

An alternative conception of autocracy assumes that the most important division in society is between the rulers sometimes simplified to a single dictator and the ruled. They assume that rulers maximize their own income from tax revenue at the expense of both rich and poor ruled.

Rulers thus set taxes at the highest rate that does not deter economic effort by citizens. In these models, rulers offer increments of democracy when doing so can increase the credibility of their promises to provide public goods and other policies that will increase economic growth and thus benefit both rulers and ruled North and Weingast ; Weingast ; Escriba Folch Alternatively, democratic institutions may be offered as a means of directly increasing revenues Levi ; Bates and Lien ; Rogowski Bueno de Mesquita et al.

In all these models, the ruled care about growth and the share of their own production they are allowed to keep. Taxation is not seen as a means of redistribution in favor of the poor, but rather as a means of enriching rulers. Rulers become rich by ruling; they do not rule because they were rich before achieving power. They cling to power in order to continue collecting revenue from the productive population under their control, not to protect themselves from redistributive taxation.

The main p. Both of these approaches offer some insights into the process of democratization. These models, like large-N studies of democratization to date, have implicitly assumed that a single model will explain democratization in all times and all circumstances.

As noted above, Boix argues that income equality and capital mobility reduce elite fears of democracy, the first because it reduces expected redistribution by popular governments and the second because it provides capital holders with an exit option if taxes become confiscatory. This is a seminal contribution to the literature on democratization because it provides plausible microfoundations for the observed correlation between development and democracy.

Other laudable aspects of the research include a serious effort to test the argument and the inclusion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century democratizations in the analysis. Virtually all other quantitative studies of democratization have looked only at the post-Second World War period because of data limitations. Boix has made a huge effort to overcome those limitations. The Boix study has not resolved all debates, however, in part because the empirical support for the argument is somewhat ambiguous.

On the positive side, income inequality has a substantial effect on the likelihood of democratization in a dataset that covers —90 and thus excludes most African democrati-zations. We do not know if the result would change if a number of transitions in poor African countries were added. The percentage of family farms, used as a proxy for inequality in the historical tests, has a negative effect on the probability of transition, contrary to expectations.

One of the measures of capital mobility, average share of agriculture as a percentage of GDP, fails to produce expected results. Other indicators used to measure capital mobility have strong effects but ambiguous interpretations. The ratio of fuel exports to total exports, for example, is a plausible indicator of capital mobility.

Average years of schooling is used as a measure of human capital, which is more mobile than physical capital, and Boix finds a positive relationship between education and democratization. Many other analysts have found this relationship, however, and attributed it to the propensity of more-educated citizens to demand democracy. The argument fits well with the stylized facts of West European democratization, however, and redistributive changes followed democratization in Western Europe as this argument would predict Lindert Further tests of this argument deserve to be important items on the research agenda of students of democratization.

Its predictions are complicated, however, by limiting the threat of revolution to periods of recession. In this argument, when the rich are threatened by revolution which only occurs during recession , they can grant redistribution without changing the political system, grant democracy as a way of making the commitment to redistribution credible, or repress.

Redistribution without regime change is not credible to the poor because they know that they cannot maintain the threat of revolution after the recession is over.

According to Acemoglu and Robinson, democratization is a more credible commitment to maintaining redistribution over a longer time period. Why the poor should accept democratization as credible when even the model allows the rich to stage coups if they are dissatisfied by the later tax rate is not clear.

The introduction of recessions, which vary in both intensity and frequency, substantially complicates making predictions about the effects of inequality on elite behavior.

Equality makes democratization less threatening to elites, but how they react to inequality depends on the seriousness of the threat of revolution and the cost of repression.

Frequent recessions, however, increase the likelihood that the elite can credibly offer redistribution without democratization because frequent recessions allow the poor to threaten revolution often, thus enforcing the bargain.

So intense recessions destabilize dictatorships leading to democratization, revolution, or repression, but frequent recessions lead paradoxically to stable authoritarianism with redistribution.

In contrast to the Boix argument, Acemoglu and Robinson expect income inequality to lead to unstable regime changes, not continued authoritarianism. One of p. The model seems to be a plausible simplification of events in much of Latin America and in a few other developing countries. It does not fit most of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia, where fear of redistributive taxation is not a plausible reason for resistance to democratization since substantial portions of productive assets were state or foreign owned for much of the late twentieth century.

State elites who control a large portion of productive assets may certainly fear loss of power since it will dispossess them, but they will not suffer less dispossession because the income distribution is more equal. Acemoglu and Robinson do not offer systematic empirical tests of their arguments so we cannot assess their fit with the real world.

Models linking democratization to inequality seem highly plausible initially, but the empirical investigation of the relationship between regime type and income inequality does not offer strong support for their basic assumptions. Nor does empirical investigation of the relationship between democracy and redistribution.

If these arguments were correct, we would expect to find the remaining dictatorships in the world more unequal on average than democracies, but Bollen and Jackman find no relationship between democracy and inequality. Przeworski et al. They find a stronger relationship between inequality in democracies and democratic breakdown, which might explain any relationship that exists between democracy and equality if one does exist , but does not support the idea that equality makes democratization more likely.

The models also assume that the main reason elites fear democracy and ordinary citizens want it is that they expect it to lead to redistribution. LIndert has shown that the expected redistribution occurred in Western Europe after the first steps toward democratization were taken, but Mulligan, Sala-i-Martin, and Gil show that contemporary democracies do not on average distribute more than dictatorships.

Income distribution varied greatly among late twentieth-century dictatorships. Many, both communist and noncommunist, expropriated traditional elites and redistributed income and opportunities through land reform, much increased public education, and industrialization policies that led to the movement of large numbers of people out of agriculture and into factories.

It is hard to imagine that elites in these kinds of authoritarian regimes would be motivated by a fear of greater redistribution. They would fear loss of their own power and wealth, but not via redistributive taxation. Income equality would not reassure them. This approach to the study of democratization, which owes much to seminal articles by North and Weingast and Olson , sees rulers as maximizing their own individual revenue via taxation and citizens as sharing a desire for productivityenhancing policies and public goods, regardless of whether they are rich or poor.

In this image of politics, taxes redistribute wealth from citizens to rulers, not from rich to poor. Rulers may want revenue in order to pursue wars, to buy support in order to stay in power, or for personal consumption; their reason does not affect the logic of the argument. Rulers are motivated by their desire for revenue to offer public goods and a tax rate that does not reduce investment or effort.

Consequently, they are the ones most likely to be accommodated when the ruler offers an institutionalized form of participation in return for their cooperation. As in the Boix argument, democratization becomes more likely as capital becomes more mobile, but the reason for the relationship changes.

The more mobile capital, according to Bates and Lien , the harder it is to tax without contingent consent and thus the more likely the ruler will offer representative institutions. In democracies, the selectorate is the enfranchised population, and the winning coalition is made up of those who voted for the winning party or coalition, that is, roughly 50 percent of the selectorate.

In single-party authoritarian regimes, the winning coalition is the small group of actual rulers, and the selectorate is made up of all members of the ruling party. In military regimes, the winning coalition is the junta and the selectorate is the officer corps. They do not discuss reasons for different authoritarian institutional choices.

If enough members of the ruling coalition defect because they are dissatisfied with their share, the ruler is overthrown. Citizens outside the winning coalition benefit only from the public goods provided when the winning coalition is too large to be maintained by private goods alone. Residents and sometimes members of the selectorate may hold demonstrations or join rebellions to challenge rulers who tax them too heavily or provide insufficient public goods, but rulers in this model always respond with repression.

If revolutionary challengers win despite repression, the new rulers face the same incentives that other rulers do to narrow the winning coalition and keep resources for themselves. In other words, revolutions and popular uprisings in this model do not threaten redistribution or lead to democracy.

Instead they lead to a seizure of power by a new leader and winning coalition who maximize their own wealth at the expense of those they exclude.

One of the most useful and empirically realistic points made by Bueno de Mesquita et al. Thus democracy cannot arise as a response to popular uprising in this model.

Instead, it arises when the members of the winning coalition can benefit themselves by expanding its size. Members of winning coalitions are cross-pressured when it comes to the size of coalition they prefer to be part of. Their individual share of private goods is larger when the coalition is smaller, but the ruler keeps less for himself and provides more public and total private goods when the coalition is larger.

In the model, the winning coalition has a tipping point at the size at which it prefers to increase further. Once that happens, democracy will eventually follow. This model, like those described above, portrays democratization as elite led. In the Bueno de Mesquita et al.

They are not responding either to a challenge from the excluded or to the threat of capital strike. Models that emphasize conflict between revenue-maximizing rulers and politically powerless citizens capture elements of reality in many recent transitions in developing countries. Once the changes in the international economy provoked by the debt crisis had rendered state interventionist development strategies unsustainable, many authoritarian governments were forced to begin liberalizing their economies.

In order to attract private investment to replace state investment that could not be sustained without foreign inflows, governments had to offer more predictable policies and certain public goods conducive to private investment Roberts As noted by North and Weingast , Acemoglu and Robinson , Escriba Folch , and others, policy promises made by dictators inherently lack credibility. Dictators can increase the credibility of these promises by creating institutions p.

Democratic institutions such as legislatures and multiparty electoral competition can create those constraints if the commitment to the institutional change is itself considered credible. If the institutions benefit both the ruler, by increasing revenues, and the ruled, by increasing productivity or welfare, then the institutional bargain is self-enforcing and thus credible.

These models, in other words, provide a reason for expecting institutional bargains to be more credible than offers to provide desired policies in the absence of institutional change, which the Acemoglu and Robinson model does not.

These models thus suggest intuitions about why democratization and economic liberalization tended to vary together in the late twentieth century Hellman Prior to the debt crisis of the s, governments had a choice between relying primarily on state investment or private investment.

Since the s, the state investment strategy has become unworkable except possibly in countries reliant on the export of oil or other high-priced natural resources. The emphasis on the interest differences between rulers and ruled and on redistribution in favor of rulers as a central fact of dictatorship fits well with what we know about many of the dictatorships referred to as personalistic, sultanistic, or patrimonial by different authors.

These models do not accommodate the role that popular uprisings have played in many late twentieth-century democratizations, however. Moreover, most of these models are very abstract, and most tests of them have been narrowly focused or open to multiple interpretations. Some features of late twentieth-century democratization have not found their way into models, though they have been included in large-N statistical studies.

The correlation between reliance on oil exports and authoritarianism, for example, has been found repeatedly. In developing countries, oil is usually state owned or owned by foreign multinationals and taxed heavily. Whether it is state owned or not, the government draws its revenues largely from natural resource production, not from taxation on domestic wealth holders.

A large mostly descriptive literature on the effects of oil on politics exists Karl ; Chaudhry ; Anderson ; Crystal Yet, I know of no model that has grappled seriously with state ownership of productive resources and its effect on the struggle over democratization.

All models assume a capitalist economy with private domestic investors as important actors. During the third wave of democratization, however, most transitions affected authoritarian regimes in which state investment was high.

In many, foreign investment also played a large role, and revenue from foreign aid was more important than revenues from taxation in some. Many observers have suggested that international forces, such as the diffusion of democratic ideas and pressure from international financial institutions to democratize, have affected transitions, especially since the s.

Earlier quantitative studies found it hard to document these influences, but Gasiorowski and Gleditsch and Choun show that the proportion of democratic neighbors increases the likelihood of transitions to democracy in neighboring countries, lending some support to the diffusion argument.

Jon Pevehouse shows that membership in regional international organizations in which most other members are democratic increases the likelihood of democratization. Bueno de Mesquita, Siverson, and Woller ; Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson show that war affects the survival of both political leaders and regimes. Gleditsch and Choun show that wars increase the likelihood of transition from one authoritarian government to another, but neither Gleditsch and Choun nor Pevehouse shows strong evidence that wars in the neighborhood decrease the likelihood of democratization, as some have suggested.

Marinov shows that although sanctions are effective at bringing down democratic leaders, they have little effect on the survival of dictators and therefore we can infer little effect on authoritarian regimes. It may be that the focus on domestic causes is appropriate when explaining democratizations before the Second World War, but that international influences—both economic and political—have become more pronounced over time. Assuming that there is one explanation of democratization may be the reason that scholars continue to disagree about its causes.

Different analysts have deeper knowledge about some sets of cases than others, and naturally their intuitions formalized in models fit the cases they know best better than those they know less well.

The findings of large-N studies differ from each other depending on specification, time period included, and cases used, leaving very basic ideas contested. Such varying results should be expected if single statistical models are being imposed on a set of p. Two context differences that might influence the democratization process are the historical period in which it takes place and the type of regime that democracy replaces.

Early democratizations took place in capitalist economies in which the rich usually held political power. Later democratizations have also occurred in countries with high levels of state ownership of productive assets, especially natural resources.

State ownership makes possible both the accumulation of wealth by political leaders and also the distribution of benefits to supporters, and in some cases citizens, without the need for high taxation of private wealth holders. Rulers who have acquired wealth through access to state resources, in contrast to those who hold political power because they own private wealth, have to fear losing most of their assets if they are deposed, regardless of the income distribution or other factors that might affect future taxation.

Most transitions before the Second World War were transitions from some form of oligarchic government; many were gradual transitions from very limited suffrage to nearly universal. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place.

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption or cleaning up the electoral process.

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding?

The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey or Hungary. What are the best institutional and organizational responses to groups and parties that use the language of democracy to undermine democracy? Many Western democracies maintain constitutions, electoral systems, and other democratic institutions whose origins lie in the early twentieth, nineteenth, and even eighteenth centuries.

But existing institutions may be ill-suited for the challenges facing contemporary democracies. Thus, we bring together constitutional scholars and students of electoral and other institutions to examine institutional innovations aimed at improving the quality of established democracies.

These include electoral reforms e. Many of these innovations emerged out of new democracies in Latin America and elsewhere and are only recently being debated in established democracies. Skip to main content. If you ever yearned to learn more about German state and local elections under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ziblatt is here to tell you all about it. Why not in Germany? Or Italy or elsewhere? Building a vote-winning political party is hard work—and work that carries few guarantees of success in advance.

Pre-democratic incumbent elites, precisely because they were incumbents, commanded other options that seemed both easier to execute and seemingly more likely to succeed than democratic competition:.

Imperial Germany resorted to all three: a complex constitution that vested real power in ultra-oligarchic state assemblies rather than the national Reichstag; a lively culture of voter intimidation in rural districts; and of course a government that did not ultimately depend on the voters at all. Imperial German elites controlled the state without the need to win elections—and that taught them to distrust the whole electioneering enterprise. Because they did not need to win elections, they did not build strong parties.

Whereas the pragmatic politicians atop the British Conservative party could restrain ideologically motivated activists, the German Conservatives succumbed to them. The successful British Conservatives could look at Labour governments as unpleasant but ultimately temporary intervals.

The Imperial German Conservatives experienced the loss of control of the state after as an unrecoverable catastrophe to which they could never be reconciled. They could only resent and resist it.