While social scientists often theorize about the enduring effects of past regime characteristics, conceptual issues and data limitations pose real challenges for assessing these legacies empirically. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock, conceptualized as the accumulated...

Previous research has established a link between democratic governance and sustainable economic growth. Yet, over the past decade, we have witnessed a global decline of democratic institutions across a wide range of political contexts. How has this erosion of democracy affected countries'...

Democratic consolidation depends on common perceptions of institutional legitimacy among citizens aligned with governing and opposition parties. Elections always result in winners and losers, but if they also create subservient insiders and aggrieved outsiders, the future of the democratic...

This chapter first discusses some of the established literature on the effects of natural resource abundance on democratization and then shows how an empirical analysis of the relationship supports the theoretical expectations. We also reveal an under-researched aspect of the “resource curse....

This paper attempts to integrate the literatures on authoritarian regime types and democratic forms of government. Based on different modes of executive appointment and dismissal, we propose a parsimonious theory of five regime dimensions that cut across the democracy/autocracy divide: the...

This article summarizes some of the key findings from a forthcoming book, Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition? (Johns Hopkins, 2009, edited by the author), and brings together the following three articles by Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik, Lise Rakner and Nicolas van de...

In what sequence do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the processes and causes of institutional change that make up regime transitions. However, there has been limited research to evaluate the institutional...