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Since the great wave of decolonization began in the 1960s, more than 120 episodes of democratization have taken place in nearly 90 countries. 1 Those democracies established since 1980 have survived at higher rates than democratic regimes founded in the two decades prior to that year. Yet it is clear that many of today's developing-world and postcommunist democracies-including those in such countries as Bolivia, Georgia, Venezuela, and Russia-are backsliding and at risk of reversal, if this has not already occurred.
New data have the potential to shed more light on the causes of democratic collapse.2 To date, experts have tended to focus on economic performance as the key to whether young democracies live or die.3 But is this obviously the case? During the early 1990s, the postcommunist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe experienced economic distress comparable to the Great Depression but did not backslide from democracy. Conversely, years of robust growth in Thailand did not prevent a military coup there in 2006.
What if institutions-and in particular, political institutions-play the crucial role in democratic consolidation? The data suggest that this is so, and further point to institutions that place effective constraints on executive power as being of special importance.4 When a leader, whether a president or a prime minister, faces only weak constraints, the temptation grows to gather economic and political power into executive hands. As power becomes more concentrated, members of other branches of government, investors, and agents of civil society begin to doubt whether public policies will promote the general welfare. It is notable in this context that one of the first things that would-be authoritarian leaders try to do is roll back existing constitutional constraints. The actions of presidents Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin in Russia are cases in point.
Historically, data sets on democratization episodes have tended to lump together democracies founded before 1960 with those constituted after that date. Our data set focuses exclusively on the latter group, made up mostly of developing nations. Focusing on young democracies avoids the problem of weighting the data too heavily with democratizations in today's advanced industrial countries. The data set upon which this essay is based is also one of the first to include all cases of democratization in post-Soviet...