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Abstract
A number of countries have emerged as stable, electoral democracies despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighbouring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. The study of these deviant democracies is a promising new research field but it is afflicted by the lack of a consensus as to which democracies are actually deviant. The present article attempts to solve this problem by carrying out a comprehensive mapping of deviant democracies. It reviews the literature to provide an overview of the cases most often identified as deviant democracies and uses a large-N analysis of 159 countries covering the time period 1993–2008 to systematically map deviant democracies. The analysis points to 12 cases that merit further attention. These are the Central African Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Christian Welzel, Gerardo Munck, Jacob Hariri, Jørgen Elklit, Jørgen Møller, Larry Diamond, Merete Bech Seeberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning as well as the reviewers for comments on previous versions of the manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes on contributor
Michael Seeberg is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, working on a PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds.” He was a CDDRL visiting researcher at Stanford University in winter and spring 2012.
Notes
See for example, Doorenspleet, Democratic Transitions; Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy”; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy; Brinks and Coppedge, “Diffusion Is No Illusion”; Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy”; Huntington, “Democracy for the Long Haul.”
Doorenspleet and Kopecký, “Against the Odds,” 698; Doorenspleet, “Deviant Democracies,” 190; Teorell, Determinants of Democracy, 159.
Doorenspleet and Kopecký, “Against the Odds.”
Doorenspleet and Mudde, “Upping the Odds.”
Ibid.
Barro, “Determinants of Democracy”; Doorenspleet, Democratic Transitions; Teorell, “Determinants of Democracy.”
Doorenspleet and Kopecký, “Against the Odds,” 697–8.
Theoretically there are also arguments for giving less attention to such cases as several studies emphasize that small countries have a higher propensity to democratize. See for example, Anckar, “Microstate Democracy,” 67.
All articles used in the literature review are listed in the online appendix to this article.
Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy”; Huntington, “Democracy for the Long Haul”; Kapstein and Converse, “Why Democracies Fail”; Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?”; Rowen, “The Tide Underneath the ‘Third Wave’”; Varshney, “Why Democracy Survives.”
Bunce, “Comparative Democratization”; Burnell and Calvert, “The Resilience of Democracy”; Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.”
Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
Møller, Skaaning, and Seeberg, “Asymmetrical Constraints on Democratic Regime Types.”
Dahl, Polyarchy; Dahl, Democracy and its Critics.
O'Donnell, “On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems”; O'Donnell, “Democracy, Law, and Comparative Politics.”
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 269.
Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, 14.
Alvarez et al., “Classifying Political Regimes,” and updated in 2009 by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland, “Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited.”
See Brownlee, “Portents of Pluralism.”
Doorenspleet, “Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization.”
An overview of the three measures with indicators is available in the online appendix to this article.
Doorenspleet, “Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization.”
Przeworski et al., “What Makes Democracies Endure?”
Cf. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, 30.
Teorell, Determinants of Democracy.
Barro, “Determinants of Democracy.”
Clague, Gleason, and Knack, “Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries.”
Wright, “Political Competition and Democratic Stability in New Democracies.”
For example, Bollen, “World System Position, Dependency and Democracy”; Diamond, “Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered”; Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization”; Teorell and Hadenius, “Determinants of Democratization.”
Przeworski et al., “What Makes Democracies Endure?”
Boix and Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization”; Epstein et al., “Democratic Transitions.”
Boix, Democracy and Redistribution; Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy.
The index is based on eight indicators: (1) industrialization (output of non-agricultural sector/gross domestic product (GDP)), (2) education (gross secondary school enrollment ratio), (3) urbanization (urban percentage of total population), (4) life expectancy at birth (in years), (5) the inverse of infant mortality rate (per 1000 live births), (6) the log of GDP/cap. (current US dollars), (7) radios/cap., (8) televisions/cap., and (9) newspaper circulation/cap. The index values are computed by taking the factor scores “and then using imputation on the regression line with all nine indicators as regressors.” Teorell, Determinants of Democratization, 164–5.
Elkins and Simmons, “On Waves, Clusters, and Diffusion”; Brinks and Coppedge, “Diffusion Is No Illusion”; Gleditsch and Ward, “Diffusion and the International Context of Democratization.”
Brinks and Coppedge, “Diffusion Is No Illusion.”
A geographic proximity criterion is used to score diffusion (see Teorell, Determinants of Democratization, 167). A few countries do not receive a score because of a lack of proximate neighbour countries. I have used the score of the nearest country in these two cases (Iceland scored by Norway, New Zealand scored by Australia).
Karl, The Paradox of Plenty; Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?”
International Monetary Fund, Guide on Resource Revenue Transparency.
Countries are considered rich in hydrocarbons and/or mineral resources based on the following criteria: (i) an average share of hydrocarbon and/or mineral fiscal revenues in total fiscal revenue of at least 25% during the period 2000–2005, or (ii) an average share of hydrocarbon and/or mineral export in total export proceed of at least 25% (International Monetary Fund, Guide on Resource Revenue Transparency). If changes occur over time we use Ross' (“Oil and Democracy Revisited”) data on oil and gas rents per capita (it denotes the value of a country's oil and gas production, in constant 2000 dollars, divided by its midyear population) to identify exactly when a country became dependent on large-scale revenue from resources. Regarding the particular threshold, I follow Ross' (“Oil and Democracy Revisited,” 10–13) dichotomous measure of oil income that identifies countries with more than $100 per capita of oil income. On this basis three additional countries have been coded as dependent: Sudan from 2005, Yemen from 1989, and Equatorial Guinea from 1995.
Here a crisp distinction is preferable to a continuous one since the available data are generally not reliable enough to make fine-grained distinctions and as there is much “noise” from year-by-year fluctuations in the world market prices on hydrocarbons. More generally, the crucial distinction is whether a country throughout a longer period of time has been characterized by extensive hydrocarbon production, which elites could take advantage of – or not.
Huntington, “Democracy for The Long Haul.”
For example, Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy.”
Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy.
Huntington, The Third Wave, 298–301; Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy”; Fish, “Islam and Authoritarianism.”
Fish, “Islam and Authoritarianism.”
Mill, “Consideration on Representative Government,” 392–3; see, for example, Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy”; Dahl, Polyarchy, 105–23; Diamond and Plattner, Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy.
Paldam, “Corruption and Religion,” 388.
Hayo and Voigt, “Explaining De Facto Judicial Independence,” 10; Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law,” 256.
Alesina et al., “Fractionalization.” The scores for Sao Tome and Principe and (North and South) Yemen have been calculated based on information from the Joshua Project (www.joshuaproject.net) and the Statesman's Yearbook (http://www.statesmansyearbook.com/), respectively. However, the score for Czechoslovakia is unavailable on any of these. Instead, I follow Teorell and Hadenius, “Determinants of Democratization,” and use values on ethnolinguistic fractionalization from the 1985 figures made available by Philip Roeder (http://weber.ucsd.edu/~proeder/data.htm).
Cf. Weiner, “Empirical Democratic Theory and the Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy”; Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom, “The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival”; Clague, Gleason, and Knack, “Determinants of Lasting Democracy in Poor Countries.”
Lipset, Seong, and Torres, “A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy.”
Mainwaring and Shugart, “Juan Linz, Presidentialism, and Democracy.”
Bernhard, Reenock, and Nordstrom, “The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival.”
Teorell, Determinants of Democratization.
Cf. Anckar, “Microstate Democracy,” 67.
Polity in particular only includes cases with a population above 500,000. The following cases have been excluded: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Brunei, Cape Verde, Dominica, Grenada, Kiribati, Maldives, Malta, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Serbia and Montenegro, Seychelles, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Timor-Leste, Tonga, and Vanuatu.
I have checked if any countries that are not already captured in my coding have had eight consecutive democratic years. This is the case with Bangladesh and Guinea-Bissau, both on Freedom House. Comparing with the other two measures, Guinea-Bissau has had an abrupt democratic record, whereas Bangladesh is in fact scored democratic on both and is thus included as a democracy in the analysis on these two measures.
I have rerun the analysis with a graded measure of democracy (see Møller, Skaaning, and Seeberg, “Asymmetrical Constraints on Regime Types” for further details on its construction), which shows a highly significant level for modernization. Thus, the fact that the dependent variable is dichotomous might dampen the effect of modernization.
Generally, goodness-of-fit measures are not as good as those developed for OLS-regression. However, I report the Nagelkerke Pseudo R2, which is the closest we can get to the standard OLS measure. Also this is standard in the field (see http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/mult_pkg/faq/general/psuedo_rsquareds.htm).
The studentized residuals are preferable but are, however, not compatible with logistic regression.
The threshold for deviant cases is chosen pragmatically, as none of the reviewed large-N analyses are helpful here; neither are Lieberman's (“Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research”) nor Gerring's (Case Study Research) explicitly concerned with deviant case selection. Instead Lieberman and Gerring offer a more vague qualification. Lieberman (“Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research,” 445) recommends focusing on cases that are not well explained by the model vis-à-vis truly extreme cases that are several standard deviations from any other cases. Gerring (Case Study Research, 107) advises selecting from the cases with the highest overall estimated deviance, that is, adopting a threshold relative to the given output of the analysis. Unifying Lieberman and Gerring's recommendations with the distribution of residuals produced in the analysis, I rely on a threshold of one.
To see how robust the results are I have rerun the analyses on smaller time intervals, reported in the online appendix to this article. Instead of subdividing the time period 1993–2008 into two periods, I have divided it into three and four periods, respectively (that is, five and four-year intervals). These analyses also identify the deviant democracies reported in this article. Moreover, the subdivision helps clarify the status of Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, which are deviant democracies in shorter time periods on all three democracy measures. However, for each further subdivision a handful of additional instances are identified. Dividing the period 1993–2008 into three adds Albania, Armenia, Benin, Colombia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, and Nepal to the list of deviant democracies, whereas the division into four periods further adds Burundi, Congo, Comoros, Lesotho, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan to the list. Unsurprisingly, the more we subdivide, the longer the list gets. These results suggest that – to identify stable cases of deviant democracy – we stick with those shown in .
Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism”; Carothers, “The ‘Sequencing’ Fallacy”; Doorenspleet and Kopecký, “Against the Odds.”
Lieberman, “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research.”
Munck and Snyder, “Visions of Comparative Politics,” 45–7; Brady, Collier, and Seawright, “Toward a Pluralistic Vision of Methodology.”
Doorenspleet and Kopecký, “Against the Odds,” 709.
Gerring, Case Study Research, 105–8.
Doorenspleet, “Deviant Democracies,” 202.
Geddes, “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get,” 141; Collier and Mahoney, “Insights and Pitfalls,” 67.
Doorenspleet, “Deviant Democracies,” 202; Teorell, Determinants of Democratization, 159–60.