Length of independence and democratic failure

Abstract

This article takes as a point of departure a well-known but rarely tested assumption in the literature on state-building and democratisation, namely that democratic regimes in newly established states are politically unstable. When states take their first steps as independent entities, the state-building process is often incomplete, the political institutions fragile and democratic routines yet to be established. However, with increasing years of independence, these democratic shortcomings are expected to be remedied. This makes it reasonable to assume that the likelihood of democratic failure decreases with increasing years as an independent state. Based on an extensive empirical data set, the conclusion was reached that there is indeed a negative relationship between the length of independence and democratic failure and that this association is insensitive to the period in time when the countries received their independence. Furthermore, the results suggest that the length of democratic rule has a positive impact on democratic stability. However, this pattern is detectable only in states created after 1946.

Keywords:

• time
• independence
• democracy
• democratic failure
• democratisation

Notes

1 For an empirical assessment of the relationship between stateness and democracy, see Møller and Skaaning (2011).

2 There are cases with consolidated democracy and weak national unity (e.g. Belgium, Spain), which question this assumption about national unity as a necessary condition for democracy.

3 Mann (2004) provides an impressive study about intensive conflicts generated by disagreements concerning the question of demos.

4 To measure the variables, we mainly used material from The Quality of Government Dataset (www.qog.pol.gu.se), completed with material from World Development Indicators (data.worldbank.org), World Religion Data (www.correlatesofwar.org) and the database Democracy and Dictatorship (Cheibub et al. 2010).

5 A quite new database (Boix et al. 2012) provided information on all states during this period. However, there was a very strong correlation (95.7% overlapping country-years) between this index of democracy and the index of DD, probably due to the fact that the authors of the new index ‘have drawn inspiration from the conceptual and measurement criteria’ (p. 1534) of DD and also used material and information from DD (pp. 1531–1532).

6 Both the variation of time of independence (p < .000) and time of democracy (p < .000) were more limited in the group of new states than in the group of old states. On average, the new states had been independent in 21.18 years and democratic in 14.86 years, while old states had been independent in 121.30 years and democratic in 43.94 years.