Michael Seeberg

Mapping deviant democracy

A number of countries have emerged as stable, electoral democracies despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighbouring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. The study of these deviant democracies is a promising new research field but it is afflicted by the lack of a consensus as to which democracies are actually deviant. The present article attempts to solve this problem by carrying out a comprehensive mapping of deviant democracies. It reviews the literature to provide an overview of the cases most often identified as deviant democracies and uses a large-N analysis of 159 countries covering the time period 1993–2008 to systematically map deviant democracies. The analysis points to 12 cases that merit further attention. These are the Central African Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.

Mapping anomalous democracies during the Cold War

During the Cold War, a number of societies established stable democracies despite having low levels of modernisation and relatively few democratic neighbours. Threshold levels of modernisation and neighbouring democratic societies are consistently related to the endurance of democracy. Meanwhile, the Cold War superpowers often supported autocracies, making it even more difficult to maintain democracy. Analysing these stable but ‘deviant’ democracies provides an opportunity to examine how domestic factors influence regime stability. In particular, such historical cases advance understanding of contemporary patterns of democratic stability. Previous research has not systematically identified deviant democracies before 1989. This research note does so using a large-N analysis of 125 societies during the first phase of the third wave of democratisation, from 1975 to 1988. It identifies 11 deviant democracies, including Bolivia, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey. 冷战期间，若干社会建立了稳定的民主体制，尽管它们现代化的程度较低，左邻右舍民主化的不多。民主的持久与否一向与一个国家的现代化基础水平、也与左邻右舍是否为民主政体有关。而冷战期间超级大国往往支持独裁政权，这又使得民主更难维持。分析那些稳定却并非标准的民主国家，使我们得以了解国内因素如何影响政体的稳定性。这些历史的案例增强了我们对当代民主稳定模式的理解。以往的研究没有系统地确认1989年以前的非标准民主国家。本文对第三次民主浪潮第一期125个国家包括玻利维亚、博茨瓦纳、哥伦比亚、科斯特黎加、多米尼加、洪都拉斯、印度、牙买加、毛里求斯、特立尼达和多巴哥、土耳其等做了大量案例分析。

Foundations of Political Order in Emerging Democracies

Political development and decay is one of the most studied topics in political science. The issue continues to occupy many political scientists and is also highly empirically relevant – not least in light of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The question is whether democracy can and will make headway in this region, as it has been resistant thus far to the emergence of democracy. These societies are deeply ‘patrimonialised’; that is, the practice of patron–client relationships structures the interaction between state and society. This review essay discusses two recent books that cast new light on how countries can overcome such fundamental obstacles to democratisation as patrimonialism. Most recently, Fukuyama has offered a comprehensive reinterpretation of human history with The Origins of Political Order, but one that is broadly in line with the basic understanding in North, Wallis and Weingasts Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. However, both contributions are difficult to apply to contemporary cases of democratisation. The objective of this review article is to sketch a starting point for such a contemporary analysis, which could also help us understand the prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

Competitive authoritarianism: hybrid regimes after the Cold War

Levitsky and Way’s new book has been long awaited. It has been forthcoming for almost 10 years and it is magisterial in size and content. The book’s contribution to the literature is hard to exaggerate. It writes directly into a gap in the literature and does a great job of closing it. Many scholars are interested in the ‘grey zones’ of democratization and they broadly seem to agree that democracy can be ‘partial’. Nonetheless, empirical analyses often end up assuming that countries are either ‘democratic’ or ‘nondemocratic’, and consequently overlook important aspects of regime change. Levitsky and Way instead give full attention to the grey zone countries in between. However, as will be argued, their conceptualization and explanatory account still suffer from important shortcomings. Even though Levitsky and Way are mostly preoccupied with questions about stability in what has often been termed hybrid regimes, they also delve into the dynamics of democratization and pose a fundamental question that has occupied many scholars throughout times (for example, Huntington, 1968; Moore, 1991 [1966]), namely what are the determinants of political development and stability? Most recently, Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) have offered a compelling account that focuses solely on domestic factors. Levitsky and Way offer a contrasting, but novel answer stressing international and domestic factors. Their central concept is competitive authoritarianism. Such regimes uphold free and fair elections (the opposition at times wins elections) and other formal democratic institutions are in place. However, informal institutions work to the detriment of the formal democratic institutions. The conceptualization of democracy is maximalist as these regimes uphold free and fair elections as well as civil liberties and the rule of law. However, this understanding leaves no room for interim democratic regime types, meaning that we might overlook important dynamics in these. Levitsky and Way seek to explain regime outcomes since the end of the Cold War, in cases that begin as hybrid regimes. Three factors arguably explain the majority of regime outcomes: linkage to the West, that is, density of ties and cross-border flows between a particular country and the US/EU; incumbents’ organizational power, that is, the scope or cohesion of state and governing partyBased on a detailed study of 35 cases in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Eurasia, this book explores the fate of competitive authoritarian regimes between 1990 and 2008. It finds that where social, economic, and technocratic ties to the West were extensive, as in Eastern Europe and the Americas, the external cost of abuse led incumbents to cede power rather than crack down, which led to democratization. Where ties to the West were limited, external democratizing pressure was weaker and countries rarely democratized. In these cases, regime outcomes hinged on the character of state and ruling party organizations. Where incumbents possessed developed and cohesive coercive party structures, they could thwart opposition challenges, and competitive authoritarian regimes survived; where incumbents lacked such organizational tools, regimes were unstable but rarely democratized.

Asymmetrical Constraints on Democratic Regime Types: A Comparative Study

In two recent retrospectives – marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Transitions From Authoritarian Rule – Philippe Schmitter and Guillermo O’Donnell argue that the easy spread of democracy in the latest decades has much to do with its bare-bones character. Based on these interventions and on other recent contributions, we pose three interrelated propositions: First, structural factors today impact the level of democracy more when it is understood in a relatively ‘thin’ (minimalistic) way than when it is understood in a relatively ‘thick’ (maximalistic) way. Second, this asymmetrical pattern has been on the increase over the latest decades. Third, the years 1989-91 constitute a crucial breaking point in this respect. Even though these – or very similar – claims are frequently put forward in the literature, they have not been subjected to a systematic, large-N empirical appraisal yet. We do so by employing a two-step approach. In the first step, we test the extent to which a set of structural factors have different scales of effects on thin and thick types of democracy differently today. Second, based on a somewhat cruder measurement of thin and thick types of democracy, we expand the analysis to the whole period of the third wave, using a sliding series of OLS-regressions. These analyses, covering virtually all countries from 1973 and onwards, corroborate all the three propositions.

Democratization in clan-based societies: explaining the Mongolian anomaly

Mongolia is a long-standing democratic anomaly – a democracy in a clan-based society – that is rarely discussed in research. This article addresses the question, why did Mongolia and the Central Asian countries embark upon markedly different regime trajectories following 70 years of Soviet rule? I argue that the prospects of democracy were shaped by a complex relationship between clan-based traditional authority structures, social relations based on nomadism and the style of Soviet rule. In Mongolia, Soviet authorities carefully enforced collectivization across kin groups and provided all necessary public goods to citizens, effectively dismantling clan-based authority structures. This process unintendedly fortified nomadic social relations that enabled re-emergent elements of opposition and forces in civil society to fill the void of authority generated by the Soviet collapse and to use this counterweight to state power to push for competitive politics. In contrast, the Soviet authorities’ “divide...ABSTRACT Mongolia is a long-standing democratic anomaly – a democracy in a clan-based society – that is rarely discussed in research. This article addresses the question, why did Mongolia and the Central Asian countries embark upon markedly different regime trajectories following 70 years of Soviet rule? I argue that the prospects of democracy were shaped by a complex relationship between clan-based traditional authority structures, social relations based on nomadism and the style of Soviet rule. In Mongolia, Soviet authorities carefully enforced collectivization across kin groups and provided all necessary public goods to citizens, effectively dismantling clan-based authority structures. This process unintendedly fortified nomadic social relations that enabled re-emergent elements of opposition and forces in civil society to fill the void of authority generated by the Soviet collapse and to use this counterweight to state power to push for competitive politics. In contrast, the Soviet authorities’ “divide and rule” with clans in Kyrgyzstan reproduced clans that easily took on a dominant role on the eve of the Soviet breakdown and filled the void of authority by placing themselves at the apex of political power providing welfare services and political order. This placed Kyrgyzstan on the path to a post-communist non-democracy.

Signals of Support From Great Power Patrons and the Use of Repression During Nonviolent Protests

When autocrats face threats of nonviolent mass mobilization, they are likely to respond with repression. However, when will the autocrat initiate, step up, or downscale repressive behavior during such protest events? We propose that signals of support from great power patrons play a pivotal role in emboldening rulers to engage in and intensify repressive behavior. To probe this hypothesis, we analyze how supportive and nonsupportive actions and statements of the great powers in the United Nations Security Council shape the repressive behavior of authoritarian regimes during three recent, and similar, cases of protest events: Burma 2007, Zimbabwe 2008, and Burkina Faso 2014. The cases show that the more unequivocal and consistent patron support for the besieged regime is the firmer and more violent are the responses to the domestic challengers.

Anomalous Authoritarianism: What, Which, Why?

Research on autocracies has gained new momentum in the last decade. One element of this research is the observation that some autocracies are characterised by structural conditions that are normally conducive for democracy. These ‘anomalous autocracies’ have high levels of socioeconomic development and democratic neighbour countries. The study of these cases might expose factors that are decisive for autocratic stability and studying them might give us a better understanding of barriers towards democratisation. This paper contributes to the growing literature on autocracies by mapping anomalous autocracies during the third wave of democratisation, thereby paving the way for systematic case selection in future studies. A large-N analysis of 159 cases (1975–2008) identifies Belarus, Chile, China, Cuba, Morocco, North Korea, Peru, Singapore, Swaziland, Togo and Zimbabwe. In a second step, the paper lays out a theoretical framework that centres on actors and institutions. Rulers must establish elite–elite and elite–mass interaction, and this papers argues that they can do so through quasi-compliance of elites and the masses based on traditional institutions woven into a dominant party. The paper uses the framework to tentatively examine the resilience of authoritarian rule in Swaziland and Morocco, two most-different anomalous cases. In both cases, an elaborate traditional institution has co-opted government, business and rural elites and coordinated interaction within elite circles and with the masses, in turn enabling the remarkable regime resilience.