ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT FINDINGS TO EMERGE FROM our descriptive statistics concerns the considerable cross-country and cross-regional variation we observe with respect to the economic performance and political durability of young democracies. Thus, democracy in Eastern Europe and Latin America has generally moved (with some important exceptions we discuss later) toward consolidation, whereas in East Asia and Africa it has faced greater difficulty taking root. Why is that the case? What explains this diversity in the prospects for democratic survival?

In this chapter we explore these questions from a regional perspective. Naturally, we do not pretend to offer a detailed history of the political economy of each part of the developing world; instead, following a pioneering article by Krieckhaus (2006), we highlight the effects of the “initial conditions” commonly associated with particular places – for example, income and asset inequality in Latin America and ethnolinguistic fragmentation in Africa – on subsequent political and economic developments following the shift to a democratic polity. Although some of the variables we focus on in what follows do not necessarily loom large in our regression analysis, they do emerge as significant in the context of particular countries and this reminds us of the importance of conducting in-depth case study research alongside large-N data analysis.