Random Walks into Democracy and Back. The Case against Causal Explanations of Democratization

Apolte, Thomas

Zusammenfassung

Due to the complexity of historical processes that have led into sustainable democracy,
determining generally applicable theories of democratization without violating
standards of modern methodology is difficult if not impossible. Hence, we
follow an alternative avenue by distinguishing singular democratization events
from the politico-institutional soil on which they fall. We represent the latter
by the type of loyalty on which government officials coordinate in cases of loyalty
conflicts: either to other government officials; or to the rules of the underlying
power-sharing arrangement. We embed our results in a dynamic framework and
then run a number of simulations that reconstruct possible historical paths into
and out of (sustainable) democracy. We demonstrate that the evolution of sustainable
democracy, but also its demise, may evolve out of a purely random walk, i.e.
a sequence of serially—although not necessarily spatially—uncorrelated historical
events, rather than out of any identifiable and generalizable causal driver.

Schlüsselwörter
Democratization Transitions; Autocratic Transitions; Self-enforcing Constitutions.