This article presents evidence of a global trend of autocratization. The most visible feature of democracy – elections – remains strong and is even improving in some places. Autocratization mainly affects non-electoral aspects of democracy such as media freedom, freedom of expression, and...

How does the order in which liberalization unfolds affect the likelihood for a successful democratic transition? Dahl was among the first to argue that the sequence matters for the outcome when it comes to democratization. This paper builds upon his work and empirically analyzes pathways to...

This paper presents a new approach for studying sequences across combinations of binary and ordinal variables. The approach involves three novel methodologies (frequency analysis, graphical mapping of changes between “events”, and dependency analysis), as well as an established adaptation...

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? Research has focused on socioeconomic and institutional factors, yet the assumption that political liberalization has to precede democratization has not been systematically examined. We explore the impacts of granting civil rights...

This paper presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social science analysis. The approach involves repeated pairwise investigations of...