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Democracy by Mistake: How the Errors of Autocrats Trigger Transitions to Freer Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2020

DANIEL TREISMAN Open the ORCID record for DANIEL TREISMAN [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

How does democracy emerge from authoritarian rule? Certain influential theories contend that incumbents deliberately choose to share or surrender power. They do so to prevent revolution, motivate citizens to fight wars, incentivize governments to provide public goods, outbid elite rivals, or limit factional violence. Examining the history of all democratizations since 1800, I show that such deliberate-choice arguments may help explain up to about one-third of the cases. In more than two-thirds, the evidence suggests that democratization occurred not because incumbents chose it but because, while trying to prevent it, they made mistakes that weakened their hold on power. Rather than being granted by farsighted elites or forced on them by the rise of new classes, democracy appears to have spread most often because of incumbents’ missteps that triggered previously latent factors.

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Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 792 - 810
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© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

I thank Vladimir Gimpelson, Genadii Iakovlev, Alexander Libman, Staffan Lindberg, Israel Marques, Andrei Melville, Thomas Pepinsky, Kirill Rogov, Daniel Ziblatt, and other participants in seminars at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and the 2017 APSA convention (San Francisco) for their helpful comments, and Laila Vinson and Kevin Gatter for research assistance. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PYRVKV

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