• DOI:10.1017/S0003055408080143
• Corpus ID: 34430604

Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation

@article{Svolik2008AuthoritarianRA,
  title={Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation},
  author={Milan W. Svolik},
  journal={American Political Science Review},
  year={2008},
  volume={102},
  pages={153 - 168}
}

• Milan W. Svolik
• Published 1 January 2007
• Economics
• American Political Science Review

I present a new empirical approach to the study of democratic consolidation. This approach leads to new insights into the determinants of democratic consolidation that cannot be obtained with existing techniques. I distinguish between democracies that survive because they are consolidated and those democracies that are not consolidated but survive because of some favorable circumstances. As a result, I can identify the determinants of two related yet distinct processes: the likelihood that a democracy consolidates, and the timing of authoritarian reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. I find that the level of economic development, type of democratic executive, and type of authoritarian past determine whether a democracy consolidates, but have no effect on the timing of reversals in democracies that are not consolidated. That risk is only associated with economic recessions. I also find that existing studies greatly underestimate the risk of early reversals while simultaneously overestimating the risk of late reversals, and that a large number of existing democracies are in fact consolidated.