Why do military dictatorships become presidential democracies? Mapping the democratic interests of autocratic regimes
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Why do military dictatorships become presidential democracies? Mapping the democratic interests of autocratic regimes Christian Bjørnskov1,2 Received: 17 December 2018 / Accepted: 10 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Recent data show that virtually all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that the reason is that military interests are able to coordinate on status-preserving institutional change prior to democratization and prefer political institutions with strong veto players. Civilian interests are more likely to suffer from coordination failure by being more diverse and less cohesive, implying that most military democratizations are planned partially while most democratization events from civilian autocracy are unforeseen or poorly planned. Exploring the characteristics of 111 democratization episodes between 1950 and 2017 illustrates features broadly consistent with further theoretical predictions. Keywords Dictatorship · Democracy · Political institutions JEL Classifications P16 · D72 · D74 · K16
1 Introduction Since the 1980s, more than 50 countries have democratized, although several democratic regime transitions have proven to be unstable. When communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, many countries democratized rapidly when they got the chance. Poland and Czechoslovakia held free and fair elections in late 1989; with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, democracy spread to both the neighbouring Baltic countries and as far as Mongolia. Similarly, the end of the Cold War brought new impetus to African democracy and, even earlier, several military dictatorships in Latin America had moved in that direction. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-019-00736-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Christian Bjørnskov [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Aarhus University, Fuglesangs Allé 4, 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark
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Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, 102 15 Stockholm, Sweden
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Public Choice
While an extensive literature since Lipset (1959) has discussed when societies democratize and whether or not regime transitions are stable, much less attention has been paid to the particular choice of democratic institutions: Democracy can exist under a presidential or parliamentary system, with one or two chambers, different election procedures and a variety of veto institutions and constitutional provisions. The focus of this paper is exploring which type of democracy—and which consequences—may arise when different types of autocracies introduce effectively democratic political institutions. The starting point of the paper is a peculiar feature that democratization studies seem to have been ignoring so far: when military dictatorships—that is, autocracies in which political executives have military ranks and backgrounds
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