Successful and failed episodes of democratization: conceptualization, identication, and description

Varieties of Democracy Institute: Working Paper No. 97. Abstract What explains successful democratization? This paper makes four contributions towards providing more sophisticated answers to this questishowing that while several established covariates are useful for predicting outcomes, none of them seem to explain the onset of a period of liberalization. Fourth, it illustrates how the identification of episodes makes it possible to study processes quantitatively using sequencing methods to detail the importance of the order of change for liberalization outcomes.

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