Episodes of Liberalization in Autocracies: A New Approach to Quantitatively Studying Democratization
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Political Science Research and Methods, Volume 11, Issue 3, 2022, pages 501-520.
Rights
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use.
APA Citation
Wilson, M. C., Medzihorsky, J., Maerz, S. F., Lindenfors, P., Edgell, A. B., Boese, V. A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2022). Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization. Political Science Research and Methods, 11(3), 501–520. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.11