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The empirical study of democratic regimes in the last fifty years has focused on the question of what makes for stable democracies.[1] Various hypotheses have been put forward and tested about the social and political conditions under which democratic regimes come to be or to endure. A presupposition of most of this research is that democratic regimes are particularly fragile. The supposition that democracies are fragile probably has a number of sources. The frightening experience of the descent of European democracies into fascism and communism is perhaps the most important. But we can also find support for this presupposition in the evident fragility of democratic regimes in the less developed world. And, standing behind these events, is the long standing tradition in political philosophy—and especially, in pre-modern political thought—of disparaging democracy and warning that it is likely to lead to tyranny.
We do not dispute the notion that democratic regimes are fragile. But we observe that all political regimes are fragile. Political stability is by no means the norm in human history. The question thus becomes whether democratic regimes are more fragile than authoritarian regimes. This, we believe, remains a much ignored and thus open question.
The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary exploration of this issue. We present some initial empirical data that address the relative stability of authoritarian and democratic regimes. But, before we begin to attempt to test the hypothesis that democratic regimes are at least as stable than authoritarian ones, if not more so, we must first answer some preliminary questions about the conceptual and operational definitions of the notions of democracy, authoritarianism and stability. This is the task of parts II and III of the paper. We more briefly discuss our data and statistical methods in parts IV and V of the paper and present some initial results in part VI. We begin, in part I, with some theoretical reasons for thinking that democratic regimes might be quite as stable as authoritarian ones.
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