Political Institutions, Development, and a Domestic Civil Peace

A central idea in the project is that many of the factors that enable democratization are the same as those that enable countries to subsequently avoid civil war. This idea will be investigated by studying whether the factors above that are important for conflict prevention are also important for successful democratization. This is particularly likely to be the case for the factors listed as challenges above. Although there is a clear empirical relationship between development and democracy, there is disagreement whether this is merely due to the observation that developed democracies are very stable, or whether development also leads to democratization. There is also disagreement about what is the causal mechanism behind this regularity. Hypotheses to be investigated is whether appropriability, exit options, and dispersion of economic resources are important factors for both democratization and for democratic stability. The project will employ this to construct tests that are more precise than ones merely relying on data on average income as is common in the literature. The project will investigate an empirical implication of the model of the ideal regime types (consistent democracy and consistent autocracy) as the only stable equilibria. If it holds, a political system in change will have a strong tendency to move toward the closest equilibrium. However, other factors also play a role, such as external factors as democracy levels and economic development in neighboring countries (which should create a 'pull' toward the dominant ideal type in the neighborhood), or shocks such as international wars. As noted above, democratization may be a top-down or a bottom-up process. The project will explore the possibilities for distinguishing between these two different types of democratization, and study empirically under what conditions the different forms tend to occur. A plausible hypothesis is that top-down democratizations occur where appropriation is becoming less profitable so that elites have larger interests in promoting country-wide economic growth, and bottom-up processes where the incentives for appropriation make elites reluctant to share power. 

What enables democracies to avoid civil war and to remain stable? 

Implicit in this question is the idea that effective conflict prevention in some circumstances is different in democracies than in non-democracies, since the regime types rely on different strategies. Preliminary research indicates that democracy has a stronger relationship with peace for middle- and high-income countries than for low-income countries. The necessity of preventing challenges from marginal groups also in democracies suggests similarities. Such similarities and differences will be investigated. The project will also look into whether democratic stability depends on many of the same conditions as the prevention of civil war. Previous research strongly suggests that partial democracies are very inefficient in conflict prevention, but it is unclear whether this is because they reflect underlying power struggles, have institutional inconsistencies, or short time horizons since they tend to be transitional regimes. Guided by the theoretical models, this sub-project will formulate empirical models that allow distinguishing between different explanations. In particular, the project will study how the design of political institutions such as their consistency interplay with underlying factors such as the presence of rent-generating natural resources. It will also investigate the importance for democratic regimes of their military capabilities, their capacity for policy formulation and implementation, and the design of the democratic institutions themselves (e.g. majoritarian vs. consociational systems). It will look at the importance of the external challenges the institutions face, such as an economy where rent-generating resource extraction is important, the electorate is illiterate, preferences are extremely polarized, and there are large inequalities and widespread poverty. The sub-project will also look at the importance of institutional design for stability.