Why Do Military Dictatorships Become Presidential Democracies? Mapping the Democratic Interests of Autocratic Regimes

Christian Bjørnskov

No 1194, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: This paper starts with the observation that almost all military dictatorships that democratize become presidential democracies. I hypothesize that military interests are able to coordinate on status-preserving institutional change prior to democratization and therefore prefer political institutions with strong veto players. Parallel civilian interests conversely suffer from coordination failure by being more diverse and les cohesive. The hypothesis therefore implies that most military democratizations are partially planned while most democratization events from civilian autocracy are either unforeseen or poorly planned. Exploring the characteristics of 111 democratization episodes between 1950 and 2015, I find a number of features broadly consistent with further theoretical predictions.

Keywords: Dictatorship; Democracy; Political institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 K16 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-12-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
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Related works:
Journal Article: Why do military dictatorships become presidential democracies? Mapping the democratic interests of autocratic regimes (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1194

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