Patterns of Regime Breakdown Since the French Revolution
Abstract
We present a temporally fine-grained data set on regimes, defined as the formal and informal rules essential for selecting leaders. The data set comprises more than 2,000 regimes from 197 polities, 1789 to 2016. We highlight how the frequency of breakdowns and particular modes of breakdown have followed cyclical rather than monotonic patterns across modern history. The most common breakdown modes, overall, are coups and incumbent-guided regime transformations. Furthermore, we report robust evidence that low income, slow or negative growth, and intermediate levels of democracy predict a higher likelihood of regime breakdown. Yet, by running change-point analysis we establish that breakdown risk has cycled substantively across periods of modern history, and the aforementioned explanatory factors are more clearly related to breakdown during certain periods. When disaggregating different breakdown modes, low income is related to, for example, breakdown due to popular uprisings, whereas intermediate democracy levels clearly predict coup-induced breakdowns and incumbent-guided transitions.
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Biographies
Vilde Lunnan Djuve is PhD fellow at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. Her work centers on political instability of various kinds, with a special focus on regime transitions where existing regime elites are involved in guiding the process of change.
Carl Henrik Knutsen is a professor in Political Science at the University of Oslo. He has worked on, e.g., questions pertaining to the economic effects of political institutions and regimes, regime duration and change, as well as measurement of democracy.
Tore Wig is an associate professor in Political Science at the University of Oslo. He has worked on, e.g., elections and coups, breakdown of autocratic regimes, and sub-national institutions and civil conflict.
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