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Abstract: Do elections conduce to or prevent autocratic regime breakdown? This paper distinguishes between negotiated and forced transitions, and it posits that elections facilitate negotiated regime transitions. Elections reveal information about regime strength, which aligns power contenders’ expectations about the outcome of a potential armed conflict. Therefore, elections in the recent past make power contenders more likely to negotiate a peaceful regime transition. Using two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable models, this paper examines regime transitions in 261 autocracies from 1955 to 2010 with long regime-month panel data. It introduces a new global dataset of autocratic election schedules and a novel measure of autocratic party strength. Findings suggest that negotiated transitions are more likely to occur in autocracies with recent national elections than in those without; but this negotiation effect only holds for regimes with either no support party or a weak one, because strong ruling parties shape power contenders’ expectations about regime strength, leaving less room for elections to yield information. This paper demonstrates the distinct logics of negotiated and forced transitions with implications for understanding how and when elections can produce peaceful regime change.
Presented at APSA 2019, PEDD 2020, MWEPS V in 2020, and SPSA 2021. |
Marginal Effects of Elections on Negotiated Transitions
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