Democratization:

Measures of Regime Change in Comparative Perspective

Paper prepared for workshop 17, “The Numbers We Use, The World We See: Evaluating Cross-National Datasets in Comparative Politics”, directed by Cas

Mudde and Andreas Schedler, at the 2008 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Rennes, 12-16 April 2008.

Work in progress. Comments welcome, quotes not yet.

Matthijs Bogaards Associate-Professor in Political Science

School of Humanities and Social Sciences Jacobs University Bremen

Campus Ring 1 D-28759 Bremen, Germany

Website: http://www.jacobs-university.de/directory/02727

January – July 2008: Research Fellow, UN University for Peace, Costa Rica

2Abstract

In the literature on “the third wave of democratization”, the concepts of regime change and democratization are often used in a loose fashion. Recent interest in the question how to measure democracy has not been matched by attention to the question of how to define and operationalize democratic transitions. This paper presents an overview of the main approaches to the empirical identification of democratic transitions using widely available databases with regime characteristics and regime classifications. The second part of the paper then revisits the controversial argument that new, incomplete democracies are more likely to go to war and examines, briefly, how different conceptions of democratization affect case selection and empirical results.

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Introduction It is common to talk about a “third wave of democratization” to denote the global spread of democracy in the past three decades and there is by now a substantial literature on democratic transitions. However, the question of how to operationalize the concept of "regime change" has not received much attention. This is all the more surprising in light of the increasing interest in measuring democracy (See, for example, Bogaards 2007a/b). This workshop paper examines how political scientists operationalize "democratization" and "democratic transition" with the help of such widely used measures of democracy as Freedom House and Polity, as well as other measures of democracy and regime classifications. In a previous paper, I have examined the many different ways in which scholars draw the line in continuous measures of democracy.1 That analysis was static in the sense that it was interested in regime classifications at a particular moment in time. In this workshop paper, in contrast, the analysis is dynamic, in that it focuses on regime change and looks exclusively at those studies that are explicitly dealing with the process of democratization. The paper starts with an overview of the different ways to empirically capture transitions to democracy. Broadly speaking, there are two ways in which regime change is operationalised. First, as a change of categories. These can be derived from scores (Freedom House, Polity, Vanhanen) or come directly from categorical coding schemes (Gasiorowski, Przeworski et al.). The second way to assess regime change is through a change of scores. Such a change can be defined by magnitude and/or direction. The second part of the paper stages a first, preliminary, test of the possible effect of different operationalizations and classifications on theory testing in comparative politics and international relations through a tentative re-examination of Mansfield and Snyder's (2005) research on the relation between democratization and violent conflict. These authors use Polity categories to operationalize regime change and claim to have established a relationship between (incomplete) democratization and war. Is this result robust to different operationalizations of regime change as can be found in the literature? This will be the first systematic test, however incomplete, of the misgivings about case selection in Mansfield and Snyder (2005) voiced by scholars like Carothers (2007b) and McFaul (2007).

1 Matthijs Bogaards, “From Degree to Type: The Difficult Art of Drawing the Line in Continuous Measures of Democracy”, paper presented at the annual conference of the Swiss Political Science Association, Balsthal, November 2006 and, in a revised version, at the ECPR General Conference, Pisa, September 2007.

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Conceptualizing and Measuring Democratization The first publication to systematically track the spread of democracy in recent decades was Huntington (1991). This popular book has made a lasting contribution with, and some would say only because (Zimmerling 2003) his metaphor of “the third wave”. As Kurzman (1998) shows, the notion of “a wave of democratization” can refer to three rather different phenomena: 1) an increase in the level of democracy world-wide; 2) the number of transitions to democracy being higher than the number of authoritarian regressions in a particular period; 3) a pattern of linkages between transitions. Likewise, democratization can mean more than one thing. In the broadest sense, democratization refers to any change in the direction of more democracy, no matter how small. For example, Enterline (1996) operationalizes democratization as an improvement of one point on the 21-point Polity scale. In the narrow sense, democratization is synonymous with a democratic transition. The notion of a democratic transition implies a change of category and a dichotomous conceptualization of democracy. Munck (2001b: 3425) defines a democratic transition as “the critical step.... when a country passes a threshold marked by the introduction of competitive elections with mass suffrage for the main political offices in the land”.2 Not everybody agrees with this. Taking the notion that “democracy is always a matter of degree” to its logical extreme, Bollen and Jackman (1989: 618) state that “it is meaningless to claim that democracy was inaugurated in a given country on a single date”. Scholars who conceive democracy as a matter of degree not merely view the distinction between democracy and non-democracy in graded terms, as Collier and Adcock (1999: 546) contend, but have done away with that distinction all-together, viewing democracy and its absence as endpoints on a continuum on which any thresholds or boundaries are arbitrary. Such “degreeism” (Sartori 1991) not only does away with the notion of a democratic transition, it also negates the concept of regime and regime type. Huntington (1991) defines a democratic transition as the moment when at least half the male citizens has the right to vote and the chief executive is directly elected or depends on a majority in an elected parliament. Huntington does not provide details on his coding decisions and sources and his classification of democratic transitions stops in the late 1980s. Perhaps for these reasons, Huntington’s classification of transitions has not been

2 On the other hand, Munck (2001a: 126) also points out that “democracy consists of various attributes and that democratization can proceed at different paces along these distinct attributes” and urges scholars to “move beyond the current view of democratic transitions as involving a one-shot change, whereby transitions to democracy are conceived in aggregate terms and consisting of one single point of inflection”.

5frequently used in other studies. Instead, scholars have relied on the longer time-series data of Polity, Freedom House, Przeworski et al., Gasiorowski, Vanhanen, and, more recently, Doorenspleet. There are by now many studies which compare the classifications of the different measures of democracy (including Bogaards 2007a/b). Much more rare is research comparing how different measures of democracy classify and time democratic transitions. In dichotomous measures of democracy (Przeworski et al. 2000; Doorenspleet 2000, 2005), democratization means a democratic transition, reflected in a change from autocracy to democracy. In trichotomous measures of democracy (Gasiorowski 1996; Reich 2002), a transition to democracy can be defined in various ways: as a change from autocracy to the intermediate category; as a change from the intermediate category to democracy; as a change from autocracy to democracy; or a combination of these. In continuous measures of democracy, a transition to democracy can be identified in two ways. First, by establishing cut-off points to create categories. Secondly, by defining democratic transition in terms of the amount of change. Both routes have been pursued in the literature. Table 1 presents an overview of the main ways in which democratization has been operationalized.

Table 1 about here

Change of categories A common means to identify democratic transitions is through a change in the categories devised by Freedom House and Polity themselves. Freedom House distinguishes between free, partly free and not free countries based on a country’s aggregate score on the twin indexes of political rights and civil liberties.3 Some authors (Starr 1991; Starr and Lindborg 2003) have operationalized a democratic transition as a change from the category of not free to partly free or free. The most widely used database for research on democratic transitions is Polity. Usually, scholars use the combined scale which subtracts the authority score (0-10) from a country’s democracy score (0-10), resulting in a scale

3 For a description of Freedom House methodology, see: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=351&ana_page=333&year=2007.

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ranging from –10 (complete autocracy) to +10 (complete democracy).4 Jaggers and Gurr (1995), who are directly involved in the Polity project, distinguish between “coherent” autocracies (-10 to -7), “incoherent polities” or “anocracies” (-6 to +6) and “coherent” democracies (+7 to +10). Enterline (1998) makes a further distinction between “incoherent autocracies” (-6 to 0) and “incoherent democracies” (+1 to +6), resulting in twelve possible regime change scenarios. In her analysis of regime change, Zanger (2000) uses the same three categories as Polity, but draws the line differently (autocracy= –10 to -4, anocracy= –3 to +3, democracy= +4 to +10). In their research on the causes of democratic transitions, Epstein et al. (2006) distinguish between autocracies (-10 to 0), partial democracies (+1 to +7) and full democracies (+8 to +10). Some scholars only interested in democracy versus non-democracy use the Polity scale, but set an alternative threshold at, for example, +5 (Pevehouse 2002) or +6 (Reich 1999). Russett (1993) multiplies the Polity score with the variable for domestic concentration and categorize regimes as autocracy (-100 to –25), anocracy (-24 to +29) and democracy (+30 to +100).5 Mansfield and Snyder (1995) use this categorization to determine regime change. In a re-analysis of Mansfield and Snyder (1995), Thompson and Tucker (1997) reconfigure Maoz and Russett’s formula. Their regime taxonomy looks like this: 0.5 to 5 (autocracy), 5.5 to 9.5 (anocracy), 10 to 21 (democracy). The hidden assumption in the analysis of regime change and democratic transitions with the help of Polity or Freedom House categories is that these categories correspond to regime types. However, there is little reason to believe they do.6 The relationship between regime types and categories derived by third parties from Polity and Freedom House data is even more tenuous. That this is not perceived as a problem in the literature on democratic transitions is probably due to the general absence of any conception of regime or regime type. For example, Epstein et al. (2006) never define their concept of “partial democracy”: they only provide a measure. Gates et al. (2006: 898) do the same when they “define” a polity change as a change in their indicators. Doorenspleet (2000, 2005) stands out by her careful definition and operationalization of democracy, autocracy, and democratic transition. She supplements Polity data with information on voting rights to identify minimal democracies in her analysis of the process and causes of democratization.

4 For a description of Polity methodology, see: http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/polity/. There are many more ways to derive categories from Polity scores. Here I focus on categorizations employed in research on regime change. 5 The variable “domestic concentration” is discussed in depth below. 6 See, Matthijs Bogaards, “From Degree to Type: The Difficult Art of Drawing the Line in Continuous Measures of Democracy”.

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Different from the rest of the literature, Doorenspleet does not use aggregate scores, but substantively motivated minimum values on selected Polity components. The Political Regimes Database developed by Gasiorowski (1991, 1996) distinguishes between democracies, authoritarian regimes and semi-democracies. The latter are described as regimes “in which a substantial degree of political competition and freedom exist”, but where: 1) the effective power of elected officials is limited, or; 2) the freedom and fairness of elections are compromised, and/or; 3) civil and political liberties are limited (Gasiorowski 1996: 471). A fourth category, of transitional regimes, is devoted to regimes in the process of deliberate top-down regime change. All the coding is done by the author himself, which he argues gives it “a high degree of uniformity” (p.475). Data are available for 97 Third World countries from independence until 1992. Gasiorowski (p.477) counts 29 transitions from authoritarianism to semi-democracy - 49 when the transitional regimes are also included, seven transitions from semi-democracy to democracy, and 10 transitions from authoritarianism to democracy – 28 if transitional regimes are included as well. However, Gasiorowski admits these 28 regimes could also have been classified as semi-democracies (p.477). This suggests that a “transitional regime” is not a “regime” in fact, but a transitory phase and that it is important to maintain this distinction. Reich (2002) updates the PRD to 1998 and extends its coverage to Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. Because his coding rules deviate from Gasiorowski’s, whose coding is in any case highly personal, the consistency of the codings is likely to be weak.7 For their test of modernization theory, Przeworski et al. (2000) have devised a dichotomous classification of regimes (democracy versus non-democracy) based on elections and election outcomes. In his life-long search for the determinants of democratization, Vanhanen (2003) developed a continuous measure of democracy using election outcomes and election turnout which he turns into a dichotomy by applying thresholds he admits to be arbitrary. Both

7 Especially problematic is Reich’s (2002) conceptualization and measurement of “semi-democracy”. His coding tree starts with a distinction between democracy and autocracy based on the presence of meaningful elections. Based on the presence of flaws in other dimensions of democracy, a democracy can be downgraded to the status of semi-democracy. Surprisingly, an autocracy can be upgraded to a semi-democracy when despite the absence of meaningful elections, the regime tolerates non-violent opposition, allows for criticism of its leaders and policies in the media, and refrains from arresting or physically intimidating the opposition. Instead of contaminating the category of semi-democracy, Reich should have added the notion of “semi-authoritarianism” to capture such regimes, in line with recent literature on “electoral authoritarianism” (Schedler 2006). For a review, see Matthijs Bogaards, “How to Classify Hybrid Regimes? Defective Democracy and Electoral Authoritarianism”, unpublished manuscript.

8measures and their resulting classifications are frequently used by other scholars.8 Change of scores In a small number of studies, democratization is measured as a change in scores, irrespective of any thresholds. In his re-analysis of Huntington (1991), Kurzman (1998) operationalizes a democratic transition with Freedom House as a change of one standard deviation, translating into an improvement of 2 points on the aggregate scale that runs from 1 (free) to 7 (not free). Blomberg and Hess (2002) are more strict, demanding an improvement of 3 points. Using Polity, Kurzman (1998) classifies an improvement of 4 points as a democratic transition, while Li (2006) sets the threshold at 3 points. More examples could have been added had the table focused on regime change and democratization more broadly instead of democratic transitions. In the quantitative literature employing Polity data, it is quite common to find the concept of regime change used to refer to any change on the Polity scale. Such use either implies the authors conceive of each value on the 21-point Polity scale as a different regime, or they do not have a concept of political regime at all. Similarly, democratization is frequently used to refer to any improvement on the Polity scale, no matter how small.9 Such use fails to distinguish between liberalization and democratization and does away with the notion of democratic transition.10 In sum, the literature often employs the concepts of regime change and democratization in a loose fashion. The concept of a democratic transition is more precise, but its appropriateness is contested by those who see democracy as a matter of degree. Different ways exist to measure democratic transitions empirically, most commonly through a change of categories. However, these categories and their boundaries are often ill-defined.

8 For a theoretical and empirical critique of the way in which the measures of democracy of Przeworski et al. (2000) and Vanhanen (2003) rely on election outcomes, see Bogaards (2007a/b). 9 See below, in the paragraph entitled “Further testing”. 10 Schneider and Schmitter (2004) make a theoretical distinction between liberalization, transition, and consolidation. However, their “liberalization of autocracy” scale with seven items is not just applied to autocracies, but also used in combination with their consolidation of democracy scale, under the assumption of “an underlying dimensional structure” (p.70).

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Democratization and War It is well known that democracies do not fight each other (Ray 1998). Going back to Kant (1986) [1795] this is known as the “democratic peace thesis”. Democracies do not go to war with each other because of democratic norms and institutions (Russett 1993). But does this hold true for countries undergoing a democratic transition? Recently, the claim has been made that democratization actually increases the chances for interstate conflict (Mansfield and Snyder 2005). The second part of the paper summarizes the argument about emerging democracies going to war, briefly examines the main positions in the debate about this controversial claim, and provides a first, preliminary, test of the possible way in which the operationalization and measurement of the independent variable, democratization, affects case selection and empirical results. The argument In a series of publications Mansfield and Snyder (1995, 1996, 2002, 2005) have made the claim that democratization leads to war. The initial argument that both democratization and autocratization lead to war (Mansfield and Snyder 1995), has since been restricted to democratization and refined through a distinction between complete and incomplete democratization (Mansfield and Snyder 2002) and the introduction of strength of institutions as a second independent variable. The fine-tuning of their argument was partly in response to the many critics.11 The full argument now states that new, incomplete democracies with weak institutions are more prone to initiate interstate wars (Mansfield and Snyder 2005). Why is this so? The logic draws heavily on Huntington’s (1968) analysis of political order in changing societies. At the heart of the problem as Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 35) see it is the “combustible interaction between insecure elites and energized masses”. The general argument is probably best formulated in terms of the incentives faced by politicians. The bottom-line is that politicians want to win elections or consolidate their hold on power. The problem in incomplete democracies with weak institutions is that politicians will be tempted to engage in “diversionary conflict” (p.36), promoting rivalry abroad to strengthen their position at home. Nationalist appeals to the masses are intended to strengthen the regime’s legitimacy. Politicians have an interest in catering to parochial interests and will typically have short time horizons. In an incomplete democracy with weak institutions, there are no countervailing powers on politicians playing the nationalist card. Following this logic, both (complete) democracy and strong institutions are necessary to

11 See, for example, the debate in the journal International Security with Wolf (1996), Weede (1996), Enterline (1996) and the response by Mansfield and Snyder (1996), as well as the critique by Thompson and Tucker (1997).

10keep potentially belligerent rulers in check. If the mechanism of democratic accountability is insufficiently strong because politicians can manipulate elections, if the mechanism of checks and balances is weak because political institutions are not strong enough and the flow of information is biased, and if democratic norms are not sufficiently developed yet to constrain politicians morally, then politicians can lead the country into a war of aggression for political gain. This presupposes that there is a reservoir of nationalism politicians can tap into, either of a general nature in the form of patriotism or chauvinism or more specific sentiments in the context of incomplete state-and nation-building (see Snyder 2000). Policy implications Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 11-12) are wary of a further global spread of democracy, which would involve the more difficult cases that have so far resisted democratization. Mansfield and Snyder expect these cases to be poorer, more ethnically divided, ideologically more resistant to democracy, with stronger authoritarian elites and weaker institutions. Botched democratization in such countries will lead to “wars of democratization”, they predict (p.12). Democratization is especially dangerous in the Middle-East and China. With “Islamic public opinion” hostile to the US and Israel, its “unleashing” through democratization “could only raise the likelihood of war” (p.13). Put bluntly, “democratizing the Arab states is a major gamble in the war on terror” (p.278). For China, the case is not made so clearly, but the suggestion is that democratization would lead to political instability which might tempt politicians to resort to nationalist appeals and aggressive foreign policy (p.15). This leads one to conclude that it might be a good thing after all the third wave is over. Instead of promoting “premature democratization” (Mansfield and Snyder 2007: 7), democrats are advised by Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 16) “to create favorable institutions in the sequence most likely to foster successful, peaceful democratic transitions”. This includes the fixing of state boundaries, strengthening the rule of law, building up a rational bureaucracy and impartial courts, and professionalizing the media. The task of creating stronger institutions that pave the way for democracy should be in the hands of “pro-reform leadership” which is not necessarily democratic or democratically inclined itself. Only when the “necessary building blocks” (p.280) are in place should priorities shift to the strengthening of representative institutions and the “unleashing of mass political parties” (p.18). That is why they call their approach “sequentialism”. Needless to say, Mansfield and Snyder’s policy recommendations have received substantial criticism. First of all, however reasonable sequentialism may sound, there is little historical evidence that this is the way democracy progressed, not even in Europe (Berman 2007a/b). As Berman (2007a: 38)

11reminds us: “The idea that a gradual, liberal path to democracy exists and that it makes sense to discourage countries that do not follow it from democratizing is a chimera based on a misreading or misinterpretation of history”. Secondly, there is little evidence to suggest that authoritarian leaders are willing or able to build strong institutions that can pave the way for democracy (Carothers 2007a/b). In fact, there is little incentive for authoritarian leaders to build effective institutions that threaten their own authority and circumscribe its exercise. As Carothers (2007b: 19) points out: “Outside East Asia, autocratic governments in the developing world have a terrible record as builders of competent, impartial institutions”. Citing South Africa in the 1990s as a successful case of sequencing (Mansfield and Snyder 2007: 6) is perverse in light of the history of apartheid. Thirdly, in practice, sequentialism may amount to little more than (continuing) support for dictatorship under the cynical guise of democracy promotion. Fourth, it is not clear how in today’s world a country could in the medium to long term balance the conflicting demands of strengthening institutions while refusing mass participation, preparing the grounds for democracy while keeping democratic forces under tight control. In the words of Carothers (2007a: 23) “people in many parts of the world want to attain political empowerment now, not at some indefinite point in the future (emphasis in original)”. Instead of sequentialism, Carothers (2007a/b) proposes “gradualism”, better understood as “parallelism”, as it argues that processes of democratization and institution building, even state-building, are reinforcing and best undertaken in combination. Finally, the focus on weak institutions should not obscure that Mansfield and Snyder’s causal argument revolves about the interaction of two variables, weak institutions in combination with incomplete democratization. Strangely enough, nobody has suggested so far that part of the solution may also lie in deepening incomplete democracies, in completing their incomplete transitions. The recommendation would thus be to democratize more fully, to identify the obstacles standing in the way of a complete transition, and to devise policies to break down these barriers. To the extent that such an agenda overlaps with strengthening institutions, it indicates that the two independent variables are not independent of each other. Independent variable: democratic transition To classify democratic transitions, Mansfield and Snyder (1995, 1996, 2002, 2005) rely on Polity data, more precisely the Polity III dataset, because differently from Polity IV it also includes a variable called “domestic concentration”, which they use as a proxy for the strength of institutions. Polity III data is available for 177 countries from 1800 to 1994. Mansfield and Snyder (2005) use the combined scale and follow Jaggers and Gurr (1995) distinction between “coherent” autocracies, “incoherent polities” or “anocracies” and “coherent” democracies (see table 1), even though they

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admit these thresholds are “arbitrary” (p.77). A democratic transition is defined as “any fundamental transition in a democratic direction between t-6 and t-1” (p.78). A complete democratic transition occurs when a country changes within a five year period from either an autocracy or anocracy to a democracy. An incomplete transition occurs when a country changes within a five year period from an autocracy to an anocracy. Democratic transitions are thus defined in terms of changes between Polity categories. With this operational definition Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 81) count 90 instances of incomplete democratization, involving 64 countries, and 50 instances of complete democratization, involving 35 countries, between 1816 and 1992. In addition, Mansfield and Snyder measure democratization using three individual Polity variables that make up its composite index: competitiveness of participation, executive constraints, and openness of executive recruitment. For all three variables, Mansfield and Snyder determine the levels that correspond to the three regime types, again defining democratic transitions in terms of a change of category. In their statistical analysis, Mansfield and Snyder systematically report the results for all four measures of democratization (the composite index and the three individual variables). They find that “key differences exist between the measures of regime type... [and] that transitions rarely occur in unison across the three component indices” (Mansfield and Snyder 2005: 82/87). ndependent variable: institu ions

In their early work Mansfield and Snyder (1995), following Maoz and Russett (1993), multiply the strength of domestic institutions with the Polity score to arrive at a regime classification and change between categories. In later work, these variables are kept separate. Institutions are defined as “patterns of repeated conventional behavior around which expectations converge” (Mansfield and Snyder 2005: 44). Relevant institutions are administrative (a non-corrupt bureaucracy, a police force that enforces the law) and those that regulate political competition (impartial election commissions, well-organized political parties, competent legislatures, and professional news media) (Mansfield and Snyder 2005: 87). To gauge the strength of these institutions, Mansfield and Snyder (2005) resort to the Polity III variable for “domestic concentration”, described by the Polity handbook as “a composite ten-point indicator of power concentration ... built on the regulation of participation, regulation of executive recruitment, competitiveness of executive recruitment, constraints on the chief executive, monocratism, and centralization of authority” (p.39). As McFaul (2007: 162) points out, this is “an odd way to measure the strength of political institutions”. First, because a concentration of power is associated with non-democratic regimes. Second, because regimes can have highly concentrated levels of decision-making, but still be very ineffective. An even more serious problem is that 4 of the 6 variables used to calculate the concentration index are democracy/autocracy variables,

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together accounting for 7 of the possible 10 points a country can obtain on this index. This means that the two independent variables in Mansfield and Snyder’s model are not independent of each other (Daxeler 2007: 547). To the extent that they do vary independently, this would be because of the variables monocratism (individual versus collective executive) and centralization of state authority (unitary versus federal states). These variables, as should be clear, bear little relationship to the kind of administrative and political institutions Mansfield and Snyder are interested in, signaling a poor fit between the concept and its measurement.12 In their statistical analysis Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 112) aim to show that the predicted probability of war for incomplete democratization is higher for lower levels of domestic concentration. This is indeed so, but only for values of domestic concentration under five. Beyond that, institutional strength actually reduces the risk of war. This makes sense theoretically. However, keeping in mind that domestic concentration is a very imperfect proxy for the strength of administrative and democratic institutions, that the measure of domestic concentration is made up of much the same factors as the composite index of democracy in Polity, and that the statistical models use a continuous measure for domestic concentration and a dummy variable for democratization, one can suspect that domestic concentration mostly captures the degree to which a country is democratic. The results should then be reformulated as: the more democratic an incomplete democracy, the lower the risk of war. This could be verified by adding degree of democracy to the statistical model. Dependent variable: war The dependent variable in most of Mansfield and Snyder’s (2005: 91) analyses is war, using the definitions and data from the Correlates of War (COW) Project. International wars involve hostilities between members of the interstate system that generate at least one thousand battle fatalities. A state that suffers at least one hundred fatalities or sends at least one thousand troops into combat is considered a participant. So-called extra-systemic wars are imperial or colonial actions in which a nation-state engages in military conflict against a non-state actor, leading to at least one-thousand battle deaths. In the period 1816-1992 there have been 79 interstate wars and 108 extra-systemic wars involving a total of 88 different countries. In the case studies in Mansfield and Snyder (20005) as well as in Snyder (2000) the dependent variable is broadened to include civil war.

12 See the Polity III project information on: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/DDI/SAMPLES/06695.xml.

14A re-examination of the main results The statistical analysis at the monadic (individual states) and dyadic (pairs of states) level confirms the theory, Mansfield and Snyder (2005) claim. This section takes a closer look at those cases driving the results. Using the composite index, there are 16 cases of war involving 13 countries. In line with Mansfield and Snyder’s core argument, we focus here on 9 incomplete democratizers involved in 11 interstate wars, shown in table 2.

Table 2 about here

Table 2 reveals some interesting facts. First, one country, the Ottoman empire, is responsible for more than one-third of the wars. Second, only four cases date from after WWII. Third, half of the cases, and even a majority if we count the Ottoman empire between 1911 and 1913 as one case, have a domestic concentration score of five or higher. This is the point where Mansfield and Snyder claim institutions are so strong that the probability of war in incomplete democratizers is not significantly raised compared to other types of transition or the absence of regime change. This is true for all four measure of democratization (Mansfield and Snyder 2005: 112-115). In contrast, table 2 clearly shows a pattern of incomplete democratizers with relatively strong institutions involved in war.13 Fourth, not one of the incomplete democratizers initiated a war. Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 130) purport that “analyses of war initiation are not in themselves adequate tests of our theory”, because incomplete transitions may provoke external intervention and because not all wars initiated by incomplete democratizers exhibit their theory’s causal mechanism. They further admit that in explaining war initiation, domestic concentration is insignificant. However, they still maintain to have found a relationship between incomplete democratization and war initiation, especially as the period over which regime change is measured grows longer (p.134). Table 2, however, reveals that all incomplete democratizers were involved in war because they were attacked, even though Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 134) find “no evidence that states undergoing transition toward democracy are disproportionately prone to being attacked”. Finally, incomplete transitions were indeed highly incomplete. Only three cases have a positive Polity score, and then only barely. This brings us back to the question posed in the first part of the paper about the interpretation of

13 Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 131) acknowledge the possibility of this combination, suggesting it is a less common scenario of powerful elites using a strong bureaucracy to promote counterrevolutionary nationalism, exemplified by Germany before WWI (pp.171-172).

15category changes with Polity. Does it make sense to view a change from absolute autocracy to a score of –6, as in the case of Austria-Hungary in 1848 or Iran in 1979, as a democratic transition, albeit an incomplete one? And what happens to the results if a different measure of democratization is employed? The final columns of table 2 show the codes for Vanhanen, Doorenspleet, and Gasiorowski. The picture is clear. For Doorenspleet, none of Mansfield and Snyder’s incomplete transitions qualify as a democratic transition. For Vanhanen, only two cases pass his threshold of democracy, due to multi-party elections in which a sizeable percentage of the population participated and even though in both cases one party won handsomely. Mansfield and Snyder could reply that this is to be expected, since Vanhanen and Doorenspleet purport to establish a minimum for democracy while their argument is precisely that these cases are incomplete democratizers. Therefore, the final test comes from Gasiorowski, who includes the category of “semi-democracy”. His data are not available for European countries or for the Ottoman Empire. Still, none of the four cases that are covered in his database are classified as even a “semi-democratizer”. The update and extension of the dataset by Reich (2002) also has data for Yugoslavia. Again, no transition is registered. In sum, Mansfield and Snyder do not present a single case where incomplete democratizers (on their main criterion, the composite index) initiate a war. Of those incomplete democratizers involved in war, only three countries, involved in five wars, display the combination with weak institutions Mansfield and Snyder deem typical. Moreover, alternative measures disagree with the classification of these cases as (incomplete) democratizers. Case studies In the second part of their book, Mansfield and Snyder select for closer scrutiny ten cases of incomplete democratizers initiating war: France 1849-1870; Prussia/Germany 1848-1945; Chile 1879; Guatemala 1885 and 1906; Serbia 1877, 1885, 1912, 1913; Thailand 1940; Iraq 1948-1949; and Argentina 1982. None of these cases underwent an incomplete transition according to Polity’s composite index. The only war that France was involved in as an incomplete democratizer was the 1849 intervention in the Roman republic. All other wars by Napoleon III were fought after his regime turned authoritarian again. Prussia/Germany democratized, incompletely, only in 1871, after the four wars that Mansfield and Snyder attribute to the democratization process in this country. Chile had been an incomplete democracy for three decades when it attacked Peru and Bolivia in the 1879 “war of the pacific”. Guatemala is discounted by Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 206) themselves as proof of their theory, citing instead weak states and state boundaries as the cause for the frequent outbreak of war in Central America in that period. The four Balkan wars involving Serbia

16prior to WWI all took place at least 8 years after any transition to an incomplete democracy. The attack by Thailand of Vichy French territories nicely corroborates the theory’s emphasis on the political use of nationalism, but has little to do with democracy and more with opportunism, Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 213) admit. Mansfield and Snyder make much of what they see as the extraordinary belligerent posture of Iraq in the 1948-1949 Palestine wars, attributing this to the need of a government under pressure to outbid rivals. Iraq was indeed an incomplete democracy at the time, but had been so for more than two decades. And the most recent change in Polity scores before the war was a one-point change in the direction of more authoritarianism. If Mansfield and Snyder want to argue that democracy in the Middle East is dangerous because even moderate politicians will be coerced into a bidding war faced with electoral pressure from nationalists and extremists, they should explain why Iraq was more militant than Egypt and Syria, even though both countries were more democratic at the time. Finally, the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands islands in 1982 occurred before the transition to democracy. Many would say this military disaster in fact prompted democratization. To argue that the invasion was motivated by an anticipation of democratization on the part of general Galtieri seems speculative and the claim that Argentina was a “partially liberalizing authoritarian regime” is not supported by Polity scores, which record a very modest improvement from –9 to –8 in 1981. In sum, bearing in mind that these cases were selected to demonstrate the causal link between democratization and war and that none of them qualify as incomplete democratizers based on Polity’s composite index, the results are disappointing. In the 1990s, Mansfield and Snyder (2005; see also Snyder 2000) flag six interstate wars and four civil wars involving democratizing nations. These include the war between post-Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan about Nagorno-Karabach (1992), the 1995 war between Peru and Ecuador, the 1998 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the 1999 war between Pakistan and India in Kashmir, the 1991 and 1999 (Kosovo) wars involving Serbia, the civil wars of Burundi (1993) and Rwanda (1994), and the two Russian invasions in Chechnya (1994, 1999). The narrative seeks to highlight the role of democratization in all of these cases. No attempt is made to systematically test their theory on these cases, or to compare these instances of violence with peaceful democratizing countries, to pinpoint the conditions under which democratizers turn violent against their own population or against neighboring countries. Moreover, there again is much doubt about the qualification of many of these cases as “democratizers”. With respect to the case studies in Mansfield and Snyder (2005), McFaul (2007: 164) argues that “most of them are not cases of ‘democratizing’ states, but instead cases of regime collapse or a return to autocracy”. As McFaul (p.161) points out, “Electing to Fight is not about ‘why emerging

17democracies go to war’, but rather about ‘why failed democratic transitions, under very special circumstances lead to war some of the time’”. Even this may be an overstatement. None of the incomplete democratizers (using the composite index) initiated war. Moreover, many of the so-called incomplete democratic transitions are not failed transitions at all, but at best cases of regime liberalization. The argument therefore should sound more like “why liberalizing autocracies get attacked, sometimes”. Further testing From the very beginning of the debate about the proposition that democratization leads to war, scholars have challenged Mansfield and Snyder’s findings using different measures and databases for the independent variable. The choices reflect the general approaches as reviewed in the first part of this paper. That is, democratization is either viewed as a change of category or as a change in democracy scores of a particular magnitude in a particular direction. The latter operationalization is the more common. Wolf (1996: 177) uses Freedom House and defines “rapid progress to democracy” as “an average improvement of more than 2.0 in the combined Freedom House ratings over a three-year period”. However, Wolf only uses this alternative measure of democratization to check for a relationship with violent conflict in the post-communist states of Eastern Europe. McFaul (2007) calculates the number of transitions and the percentage of new democracies involved in war with the help of Freedom House, but does not systematically reassess the classification or findings by Mansfield and Snyder. Ward and Gleditsch (1998; see also Gleditsch and Ward 2000) examine the impact of the amount, direction, and variance of change in Polity scores on the probability of interstate war. They conclude that change towards democracy reduces the likelihood of war and that more democratic change consistently results in less war. The more variance of change a country goes through, however, the more likely war. Daxecker (2007) confirms these results for Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs), described as “cases in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, official forces, property or territory of another state” (Jones et al. 1996: 168). For these scholars and others (Enterline 1996) “regime change” simply means any change on the Polity scale and “democratization” is any change towards the democratic end of that scale. Less frequent is the use of democratization as a change of categories in the critiques of Mansfield and Snyder, perhaps because this is the method they employ themselves and because in any case the quantitative literature prefers continuous measures. Clare (2007) uses change in Przeworski et al.’s (2000) dichotomous measure of democracy as the independent variable and MIDs as

18the dependent variable. The choice for Przeworski’s categorical variable is intended to differentiate liberalization from “genuine democratization” (p.267), but this distinction is not further developed in the empirical analysis. Enterline (1998) makes a theoretical distinction between incoherent democracies and autocracies, but lumps them together in the empirical analysis. Thompson and Tucker (1997) are alone in reporting results for a re-analysis of Mansfield and Snyder (1995) with a different categorical independent variable that was described above in the first part of the paper. Therefore, no systematic re-evaluation of Mansfield and Snyder’s classification and its possible impact on the empirical results exists so far. Conclusion This paper has provided a first overview of the ways in which regime change, democratization, and democratic transition have been defined and operationalized in the literature on the third wave of democratization using widely available databases with regime characteristics and regime classifications. The re-examination of the main cases in Mansfield and Snyder’s (2005) argument that new, incomplete democracies with weak institutions are showing an increased likekihood of going to war has indicated the importance of choices made in the conceptualization and measurement of democratization. However, much work remains to be done. First, the overview of the ways in which democratic transition has been captured through changes in categories and scores that was presented in table 1 is incomplete without an accompanying analysis of the resulting classifications and timing of transitions. Second, a more systematic re-examination of Mansfield and Snyder’s argument is necessary, re-running their analysis with alternative measures for the independent variable of (incomplete) democratization using the full range of definitions and specifications available in the literature. Third, the keys concepts of liberalization, democratization, regime change, and democratic transitions, need to be defined and operationalized more precisely, along the lines of Schedler’s (1998) conceptual clarification of democratic consolidation. These are all tasks that have to be left to future versions of this paper.

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Table 1 Measures of regime change and democratic transition Change of categories

Change of scores

Measure

Specification Author(s) Measure Specification Author(s)

1 Freedom House

FH categories

Starr (1991) Starr and Lindborg (2003)

Freedom House

Improvement of 2 points Improvement of 3 points

Kurzman (1998) Blomberg and Hess (2002)

2 Polity Polity categories Mansfield and Snyder (2005) Own categories based on Polity scale Polity scale with different threshold Own categories based on Polity scale and DomCon Own categories based on Polity with additional data

Enterline (1998) Zanger (2000) Epstein et al. (2006) Reich (1999) Pevehouse (2002) Russett (1993) Thompson and Tucker (1997) Doorenspleet (2000, 2005)

Polity Improvement of 3 points Improvement of 4 points

Li (2006) Kurzman (1998)

3 Gasiorowski Gasiorowski (1996)

4 Przeworski et al.

Przeworski et al. (2000)

5 Vanhanen Vanhanen (2003)

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Table 2 Incomplete democratizing countries and interstate war Case Country

name Year of transition

Polity score before

Polity score after

Polity DomCon score

War Startedwar?

Democratizer for Vanhanen?

Democratizer for Doorenspleet?

(Semi-) democratizer for Gasiorowski?

1 Spain 1820 -9 -4 2 1823 No No No N.a. 2 Austria-

Hungary 1848 -10 -6 7 1849 No No No N.a.

3 OttomanEmpire

1876 -10 -4 5 1877 No No No N.a.

4a OttomanEmpire

1908 -10 -4-2 (1909)

3 2 (1909)

1911 No No No N.a.

4b OttomanEmpire

1912 No N.a.

4c OttomanEmpire

1913 No N.a.

5 Yugoslavia 1939 -9 +2 7 1941 No No No No6 South Korea 1963 -7 +3 6 1965 No Yes No No7 Pakistan 1962 -7 +1 2 1965 No No No No8 Cambodia 1972 -9 -5 6 1975 No No No No9 Iran 1979 -10 -6 5 1980 No Yes No No Source: This list is based on the appendix in Mansfield and Snyder (2005: 285), but excludes two extra-systemic wars (Great Britain 1885 and France 1947) as well as three cases of complete democratizers involved in war (Great Britain 1882, Belgium 1914, Turkey 1950). Data on war initiation from the COW Project, at: http://www.correlatesofwar.org/. Data for the Polity concentration index were found on: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/polity.html. Scores were calculated with the help of the Polity II Code Book found on the same website. For Iran, following Mansfield and Snyder (2005), Polity III codings were used, although they have been corrected in Polity IV. Data on democratic transitions from: http://www.prio.no/cwp/vanhanen/, Doorenspleet (2005), Gasiorowski (1996) and Reich (2002).