Socioeconomic Prerequisites and the Stability of Young Democracies

The literature on democratization has highlighted the importance of social and economic prerequisites (e.g. economic performance or income inequality) for democratic transition and consolidation. Amending this literature, Przeworski and Limongi (1997) have argued that economic development does not explain why certain countries democratise, or not, but it makes them immune to authoritarian regressions. This paper aims to distinguish the causal mechanisms, which lead from socio-economic development to democratic stability, and to test them empirically. We expect that socio-economic development (such as income, education), first of all, facilitate the consolidation of democratic behaviour of the elite, and allow for the formation of stable support for democracy among the masses. This should contribute to the stability of democratic institutions, i.e. to help them survive economic crises. Previous tests of this relationship have relied on highly aggregated indicators of democracy, such as Freedom House and Polity IV. These indicators are valid measures for the transition to democracy, but they do not grasp the underlying processes and behavioural aspects of democratic consolidation. To investigate the hypothesised effect properly, we need more fine-grained measures for a wide array of facets of democratic regimes. Therefore, we base our analysis on the newly compiled Democracy Barometer data set (www.democracybarometer.org), which covers, among others, all countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America from 1990 to 2011, with over 100 indicators for the development of formal and informal democratic rules and actors' behaviour. We investigate the differences in democratic stability, and (partial) regressions, in a time-series cross-regional and cross-national design in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. The comparison of these two regions offers an opportunity to elaborate on questions of social and economic prerequisites: both regions were part of the third wave of democratization, but the social and economic conditions varied widely from the beginning.