Unsettling Events: The Concept and Measurement of Democratic Crisis and its Relation to Democratic Regression

This contribution introduces a different take on the phenomenon of democratic regression by studying the concept of democratic crisis. Democratic crises are clearly discernible events that unfold over a limited time span and directly threaten the democratic political institutional order. They might be the starting point or culmination of democratic regressions, but might as well be a sign of unfinished democratic consolidation. This paper has the threefold aim to conceptualize the phenomenon of democratic crises, to measure it, and to explore the relationship between democratic crisis and democratic regression. So far, the concept of democratic crisis is rather vague and diffuse, and only some subsets, such as coups d’état or failed presidencies, have been subject to systematic analysis. Hence, the paper develops a more comprehensive concept of democratic crisis and a typology of crises according to agents of change, strategy of change, and severity. In contrast to common annual measures of democracy, a measurement of democratic crises captures events. The dataset is work in progress and so far consists of an inventory of democratic crises in Latin America since the end of the Cold War (1990-2012). Data compilation draws on existent data sets on political institutions and political instability. It is intended to expand the data set to other world regions in the future. Studying the relationship between crisis and regression has policy relevance: Acute crises are more likely to receive media coverage and to trigger international reactions than creeping processes of democratic backsliding, independent of whether their impact on democratic institutions is more severe or not. The paper uses the data on Latin America to investigate in which cases and contexts democratic crises are a syndrome of democratic regression or an epiphenomenon of democratic consolidation, and whether different types of crises match different sequences of democratic regression.