Acquiring the Habit of Changing Governments Through Elections

@article{Przeworski2015AcquiringTH,
  title={Acquiring the Habit of Changing Governments Through Elections},
  author={Adam Przeworski},
  journal={Comparative Political Studies},
  year={2015},
  volume={48},
  pages={101 - 129}
}
  • A. Przeworski
  • Published 1 January 2015
  • Political Science
  • Comparative Political Studies
Changing governments through elections is a rare and a recent practice. Yielding office the first time is foreboding because it entails the risk that the gesture would not be reciprocated, but the habit develops rapidly once the first step is taken. This article provides evidence for these assertions by examining about 3,000 elections in the world since 1788. 
View on SAGE
44 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
6

Figures and Tables from this paper

44 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The US 2020 Election and Learning from History
The US 2020 presidential election constitutes an anomaly for the general paradigm of learning from history that organizes cross-national research in politics. Was it a unique event that can be…
Elections, Protest, and Alternation of Power
TLDR
A model where compliance is determined endogenously for democratic and nondemocratic elections shows why reports of electoral fraud are often central to post-election protests and thus why international or domestic monitoring may be required for electoral rules to be enforceable.
Elections and Political Regimes
  • J. Gandhi
  • Political Science
    Government and Opposition
  • 2015
Post-Cold War autocracies appear novel in their use of multiparty elections, attracting the attention of scholars and policymakers alike. A longer historical view, however, reveals that what is…
To Elect or Not to Elect: Leaders, Alternation in Power and Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa
Abstract This paper investigates whether and how multiparty elections, introduced in many African countries since the early 1990s, affect a government’s commitment to welfare policies. We hypothesise…
Information Dissemination, Competitive Pressure, and Politician Performance between Elections: A Field Experiment in Uganda
Politicians shirk when their performance is obscure to constituents. We theorize that when politician performance information is disseminated early in the electoral term, politicians will…
Executive Turnover and the Investigation of Former Leaders in New Democracies
What prompts governments in new democracies to investigate elected leaders once they leave office? Theorizing about democratic regimes suggests that leadership turnover by constitutional means should…
Accountability through government alternation: Economic performance and the conditional role of political institutions in fifty countries, 1990–2015
Government alternation is a fundamental aspect of representative democracies because it is the most efficient mechanism of accountability through which voters can steer the course of government.…
The effect of alternation in power on electoral intimidation in democratizing regimes
There is as yet little consensus in the literature as to the underlying drivers of electoral violence. This article identifies a key mechanism explaining the use of electoral intimidation, a form of…
Going historical: Measuring democraticness before the age of mass democracy
Most studies of democratic developments are limited to the period after World War II. However, political regimes varied according to different aspects of democracy long before the establishment of…
When do electoral institutions trigger electoral misconduct?
ABSTRACT Drawing on two complementary mechanisms, this article explores the question of whether electoral institutions and conditions of electoral competition create incentives to promote electoral…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 57 REFERENCES
Democracy as an equilibrium
Observation shows that while democracy is fragile in poor countries, it is impregnable in developed ones. To explain this pattern, I develop a model in which political parties propose redistributions…
Authoritarian Elections and Leadership Succession, 1975-2004
Why do non-democratic regimes hold elections they might lose? In this paper, I develop a model in which authoritarian rulers agree to positive levels of electoral risk primarily to gain information…
Self-Enforcing Democracy
If democracy is to have any of the good effects said to justify it, it must be self-enforcing. Those who control the government must want to hold regular, competitive elections for the highest…
Can Parties Police Themselves? Electoral Governance and Democratization
This article outlines the logic and consequences of the classical theory of electoral governance. By empowering the executive with the administration of elections and the legislature with the…
The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction
Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing the credibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largely ignored in the comparative study of democratization. This article…
Democracy and the Market
From the instrumental point of view, the key to liberal democracy is some system of voting. Democracy and electoral competition are regarded as virtually synonymous, with interparty competition being…
Endogenous Democratization
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that…
Income and Democracy
Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such…
Accountable for what? Regime types, performance, and the fate of outgoing dictators, 1946–2004
For some political leaders losing power might entail further punishment than just being replaced. During the period 1946–2004, 47% of dictators have been jailed, killed, or had to go into exile as a…
Electoral Juggling: A Comparative History of the Corruption of Suffrage in Latin America, 1830–1930
This article examines, from a comparative perspective, those electoral practices labelled as ‘corrupt’ in Latin America between 1830 and 1930, in order to gain a fuller appreciation of the…
...
...