Chains in Episodes of Democratization

In what sequence do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the processes and causes of institutional change that make up regime transitions. However, there has been limited research to evaluate the institutional sequence of democratization in a systematic, quantitative framework. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology, Analysis of Chains (AOC), which is adapted from evolutionary biology and partial orders in mathematics. The article uses AOC to catalog chains of institutional change across 36 indicators of democracy in episodes of liberalization from 1900 to 2021. Our findings are the first to use a quantitative approach to systematically describe long sequences of democratization across many countries and over a long time series. This innovative analysis provides an important finding: we show that elections are the most common element of democracy to develop first during democratization. However, we find little correlation between the early development of elections and successful transition to democracy. These results make a pivotal contribution to ongoing debates about the process of regime transition as well as efforts to promote democracy around the world