Colonial Past, Regime Choice and Regime Stability: A Global Comparison

The present paper introduces a new way to capture the essence of colonial penetration by disaggregating the phenomenon in question into the following six subcomponents, each of which will then be measured by a number of indicators: political influence, ethnocultural connection to the mother country, geography, time, economic influence, and transition to post-colonialism. A first ambition will be to assess to what extent the level of colonial heritage explains democratic and autocratic stability. A second aim is to go beyond the democracy-autocracy dimension and additionally study if and how the colonial heritage is related to the emergence and stability of different types of autocracies and whether it explains why democracies and semidemocracies adopt and maintain presidential-, parliamentary- or semipresidential forms of government. The study will be extensive in time and space as it will cover all current independent countries during the time period 1800-2013.