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Research published in the American Political Science Review shows that anocracies—as defined by the middle of the Polity index of political regime—are more susceptible to civil war than are either pure democracies or pure dictatorships. Yet, certain components of the Polity index include a factional category, where political competition is \"intense, hostile, and frequently violent. Extreme factionalism may be manifested in the establishment of rival governments and in civil war\" (Gurr 1989, 12). Not surprisingly, these components exhibit a strong relationship with civil war. When they are removed from the Polity index, however, the original relationship disappears. I conclude that the original finding is not driven by the relationship between political institutions and civil war but rather by a less provocative relationship between political violence and civil war.

What determines the emergence and survival of democracy? The authors apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of fifty-nine factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over three million regressions with data from 165 countries from 1976 to 2002. The most robust determinants of the transition to democracy are gross domestic product (GDP) growth (a negative effect), past transitions (a positive effect), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development membership (a positive effect). There is some evidence that fuel exporters and Muslim countries are less likely to see democracy emerge, although the latter finding is driven entirely by oil-producing Muslim countries. Regarding the survival of democracy, the most robust determinants are GDP per capita (a positive effect) and past transitions (a negative effect). There is some evidence that having a former military leader as the chief executive has a negative effect, while having other democracies as neighbors has a reinforcing effect.

Despite the extensive spread of external voting across the world, exceptions remain as some countries have not passed such regulations (e.g., Uruguay) or have passed them but lag implementation (e.g., Nicaragua). Others still took a long time to join the trend, possibly presenting a pushback to the commonly accepted notion of norm diffusion to explain migrant enfranchisement. We examine a latecomer by asking why Chile took so long to enfranchise emigrants. Classified as a liberal democracy with a century of legal history of foreign-resident voting, it repeatedly rejected proposed bills on external voting since 1971. Chile enacted external voting only in 2014, regulated it in 2016, and applied it in 2017. Through legal historical content analysis, we identify which political actors proposed the bills, when, and why each failed. Left and right-leaning actors gave normative, legal, and procedural reasons that resulted in rejection and stagnation at various institutional stages. This latecomer’s constitutional tradition, strongly focused on territory and territorial links, potentially sheds light on dozens of other country cases of late adoption of the external franchise.

We examine whether the type of political regime, regime changes, and economic liberalization are related to economic growth accelerations. Our results show that growth accelerations are preceded by economic liberalizations. We also find that growth accelerations are less likely to happen the longer a political regime—be it a democracy or an autocracy—has been in place, while (a move toward) more democracy according to the Polity IV dataset reduces the likelihood of growth accelerations.

We examine the relationship between different dimensions of the political regime in place and human capital using a two-step structural equation model. In the first step, we employ factor analysis on 16 human capital indicators to construct two new human capital measures (basic and advanced human capital). In the second step, we estimate the impact of our political variables on human capital, using a cross-sectional structural model for some 100 countries. We conclude that democracy is positively related to basic human capital, while regime instability has a negative link with basic human capital. Governance has a positive relationship with advanced human capital, while government instability has a negative link with advanced human capital. Finally, we also find an indirect positive effect of governance and democracy on both types of human capital through their effect on income.

Research on comparative democratization has recently expanded its focus to issues of institutional quality: clientelism, corruption, abuse of executive decree authority, and weak checks and balances. However, problems of institutional quality are so different from those involved in regime transitions that it is unproductive to treat them as part of the same macro-process, democratization. Whereas regime transitions are changes in the form of access to power, problems of institutional quality involve the exercise of power. Abuses in the exercise of power affecting institutional quality are best characterized not as indicators of authoritarianism and deficiencies in democratization but as reflecting—in Weberian terms—patrimonialism and failures in bureaucratization. Moreover, struggles over the exercise of power involve causes, mechanisms, and actors that can be quite distinct from those at play in conflicts over access to power. The proposed analytical framework centered on the distinction between access and exercise enhances conceptual clarity and provides a stronger theoretical basis for tackling fundamental questions about politics in Latin America, including the failure of democratization to curb clientelism and foster other improvements of institutional quality, and the prospects of democratic stability under patrimonial administrations.

The events of the Arab Spring have suggested the necessity of rethinking the logic of authoritarian persistence in the Arab world. However, the internal variation in regime collapse and survival observed in the region confirms earlier analyses that the comportment of the coercive apparatus, especially its varying will to repress, is pivotal to determining the durability of the authoritarian regimes. At the same time, the trajectory of the Arab Spring highlights an empirical novelty for the Arab world, namely, the manifestation ofhuge, cross-class, popular protest in the name of political change, as well as a new factor that abetted the materialization of this phenomenon-the spread of social media. The latter will no doubt be a game changer for the longevity of authoritarian regimes worldwide from now on.

We address the strengths and weaknesses of the main available measures of political regime and extend the dichotomous regime classification first introduced in Alvarez et al. (Stud. Int. Dev. 31(2): 3-36, 1996). This extension focuses on how incumbents are removed from office. We argue that differences across regime measures must be taken seriously and that they should be evaluated in terms of whether they (1) serve to address important research questions, (2) can be interpreted meaningfully, and (3) are reproducible. We argue that existing measures of democracy are not interchangeable and that the choice of measure should be guided by its theoretical and empirical underpinnings. We show that the choice of regime measure matters by replicating studies published in leading journals.

We investigate the effect of the political regime on bilateral FDI flows from advanced to emerging countries in the period 1992–2004. We control for country size, per capita income and privatization proceeds in the host country, and use a random-effect Tobit model to exploit information from zero entries. Our results suggest that democracy does have a positive effect on the amount and probability of FDI flows from developed to emerging countries. Moreover, we find that the effect of democracy on FDI also works through the total factor productivity channel, not only the political risk one as suggested in the literature.

This article explores why authoritarian regimes create legislatures and then assesses their effect on economic growth and investment. In authoritarian regimes more dependent on domestic investment than natural resource revenue, the dictator creates a binding legislature as a credible constraint on the regime's confiscatory behavior. In regimes dependent on natural resource revenue, the nonbinding legislature serves as a mechanism for the dictator to bribe and split the opposition when he faces credible challenges to the regime. Using data from 121 authoritarian regimes from 1950 to 2002, the results indicate that binding legislatures have a positive impact on economic growth and domestic investment, while nonbinding legislatures have a negative impact on economic growth.