Investigating the State-Democracy Nexus: A New Research
Agenda1
David Delfs Erbo Andersen
Ph.D. student, Aarhus University, dandersen@ps.au.dk
Paper to be presented at the DPSA annual meeting, October 24, 2013
Abstract
Despite recent decades’ increasing interest in the state’s effect on democratic stability, the causal
relationship between state and democracy is still mired in uncertainty due to conceptual
disagreement and a tendency to assume away the mechanisms connecting the state with democratic
stability. I carry out a conceptual analysis of this literature’s key concept of “stateness” and identify
the usefulness of disaggregating this concept into the three different attributes of monopoly on
violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement which likely affect democratic
stability in very different ways. This conceptual and theoretical tripartition forms the basis for a new
research agenda. I outline how my Ph.D. dissertation aims at sparking this agenda by conducting
empirical analyses of the effects of the three attributes on democratic stability across time and
space.
1
This paper is based on Andersen, Møller, and Skaaning (forthcoming) and Andersen et al. (forthcoming).
1
Why do some democracies break down while others survive? As of today, modernization theory
seems to give the most guidance to answering this question in terms of compelling theoretical
arguments and robust empirical analyses (see, e.g., Lipset 1994; Gasiorowski and Power 1998;
Przeworski et al. 2000; Svolik 2008; Boix 2011; Haggard and Kaufman 2012: 512). However, to
survive democracies not only need socioeconomic development that forges strong and
democratically oriented citizens. Democracies also need a source of authority, the most generalized
version of such being the state, that is both able to enforce the democratic rights and accepted to do
so by its citizens. In fact, states today are increasingly able and willing to promote the political
freedom and welfare of their citizens by means of their own power apparatus (Mann 2004: 31,
2008). That a strong state is necessary for a democratic political order to endure has been a
prevalent argument among political theorists (Holmes 1995: 18-21) but among more empirically
oriented scholars of comparative politics, the relationship between state and democracy either
largely remains a postulate (e.g., Huntington 1968: 9; Rustow 1970: 350; Dahl 1989: 47; Fukuyama
2005) or is studied in very fixed spatial and temporal contexts (see, e.g., Hadenius 2001; Rose and
Shin 2001; Bratton and Chang 2006; Kraxberger 2007; Dukalskis 2008; Tansey 2011; Møller and
Skaaning 2011; Kuthy 2011). Moreover, the empirical analyses of the state-democracy relationship
are characterized by tremendous conceptual and theoretical disagreement on what aspects of the
state are important for democracy.
Tellingly, in his review of the democratization literature, Munck (2011: 38) reached
the conclusion that “(w)hile the role of the state is thus increasingly addressed in research on
democracy, more theoretical and empirical research is needed to develop this relatively new line of
inquiry”. In sum, we thus have some strong theoretical reasons for finding the state to be vital for
democratic stability but we do not know whether this holds in the real world and what it actually is
about the state that stabilizes democracy.
2
In this paper, I aim to set a new research agenda for the study of the causal
relationship between state and democracy. More specifically, I take a step further back than what is
usually done in the literature by reconceptualizing what we mean by the state in light of how it
relates to political regimes such as democracies (Goertz 2006: 14-16; Saylor 2013: 362-364). This
is to lay the groundwork for the empirical analyses which will form the main content of my Ph.D.
dissertation.
Narrowing down the agenda
A research agenda about the causal state-democracy relationship is of course a huge endeavor. First,
both democracy and state are “essentially contested concepts” (cf. Collier and Levitsky 1997;
Hansen 1998). This means that a complete investigation of the relationships between all significant
contemporary types, denotations, and connotations of the state and democracy greatly risk
becoming unfocused and unfruitful for any advancement of our understanding of the statedemocracy relationship. Second, the relationship is spurred with endogeneity in that democratic
characteristics such as elections and improved civil and political liberties tend to strengthen the
legitimacy and in turn capacity of the state (cf. Bratton and Chang 2006; Lindberg 2006; Mazzuca
and Munck 2013). Which of the two variables, state and democracy, is explanatory is thus more a
matter of the researcher’s choice of focus in his specific project as it is a matter of empirical
relevance.
In this dissertation, I focus my attention on a specific branch of research on the statedemocracy relationship, namely that centered on the concept of “stateness”. Starting with Linz and
Stepan’s (1996: 17) notion, which built on Rustow (1970: 350), that stateness is a necessary
condition for democratic transition and consolidation, this literature focuses on how particular
aspects of the state are important stabilizers of new democracies across time and space. This
3
literature has been the greatest contributor to the state-democracy relationship in terms of numbers
of articles and empirical investigations. After a slow start, the concept of stateness has become
hugely influential in the comparative politics literature, including in analyses of democratic
transition and stability. However, just as with the state-democracy literature in general, there is no
agreed-upon definition of stateness in general or in analyses of its relationship with democracy.
Approaching the state-democracy relationship from the side of the stateness literature therefore
seems to give the most focused and contributing analyses. That is, my dissertation will investigate
whether and how different aspects of stateness stabilize democracy. This first of all entails the
possibility of providing conceptual and theoretical order to the study of the effect of stateness and
the state more generally on democratic stability. Second, my empirical analyses may provide some
stronger grounds on which to evaluate and possibly correct some of the assumptions underlying the
widely held belief that “without a state, no modern democracy is possible” (cf. Linz and Stepan
1996: 17). Moreover, they may shed light on the validity of the gradually old idea in the
development assistance community of advancing state-building as a natural precondition to and
active stabilizer of democracy (cf. Repnik and Mohs 1992; Fukuyama 2004; see also the rather
preliminary analyses in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2009). I stress that endogeneity is
perfectly possible logically and expresses how, in a condition of modernization, “all good things
tend to go together”. Besides, one may control for endogeneity in each analysis.
The definitions of state and democracy to be employed in effect also narrow down the
scope of the research agenda. Throughout the dissertation, I employ a procedural and minimalist
understanding of democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in
which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”
(Schumpeter, 2010: 241) – with the precision that “people” requires a certain level of suffrage (cf. Dahl
1989: 225-232). This definition exactly enables a focus on the regimes which have taken the most basic
4
step away from authoritarianism but are still struggling with stabilizing and consolidating the primacy of
democratic elections. Democratic stability is then understood dichotomously as the survival or
continuous existence of the democratic regime. Conversely, democratic breakdown occurs when the
regime de facto withdraws its competitive or participatory edge. It is on the explanatory side,
regarding the state, that there is the greatest conceptual work to be done however. I here thus first
provide a conceptual analysis of stateness and argue for distinguishing between three different
aspects of stateness: state monopoly on the use of violence, administrative effectiveness of the state,
and agreement on who are the citizens of the state. Second, and as a virtue of this disaggregation of
stateness, I clarify how each of these three aspects may be related to democratic stability. This
enables an answer to the research question of my dissertation of whether and how stateness is
related to democratic stability. I therefore also suggest how these relationships may be studied
empirically which form a proposed outline for my dissertation. I end by providing an outline of a
specific study in my dissertation.
Mapping definitions of stateness
Around 1750, the term “state” had clearly come to denote the modern concept of the state as
denoting the political community (Hansen 1998: 108-112). It was this modern, European version of
the state which Weber (1964: 1043) famously defined as the entity successfully claiming a
legitimate monopoly on violence within a specified territory. This definition includes modern
institutions such as the military, a police force, a bureaucracy, and courts. In other words, Weber
had the modern, territorial state in mind. The Weberian definition provided something remarkably
similar for the concept of the state to what Dahl was later to do for democracy (polyarchy) within
comparative politics: a definition which scholars at least have to use as a frame of reference for
their own definitions. Indeed, a large number of scholars has simply retained the Weberian
5
definition, albeit with some important elaborations which they argue were underspecified by Weber
(e.g., Skocpol 1985: 7-8; Rueschemeyer and Evans 1985: 46-47; Gill 2003: 2-7; O’Donnell 2010:
51-53). For instance, Herbst (2000) and Brenner et al. (2003) criticize Weber’s definition for
treating the territory as a given, Migdal (1988) and Holsti (1995: 331-332) demand more focus on
the interaction between state and society, and Rotberg (2003: 2-5) primarily associates the state
with the ability to provide public goods. They all, however, take their starting point in a Weberian
conception of the state.
Despite there being a Weberian consensus on the meaning of the state, confusion was
fed back into the literature when the concept of “stateness” was introduced by Nettl (1968). The
point of departure for this literature is that stateness measures the degree to which a modern state
exists. Indeed, the function of stateness as a variable was – and still is – to bring the state into
comparative political analysis by being able to measure state strength (Nettl 1968: 579). The reason
that this has caused confusion is that scholars mean very different things when they refer to
stateness. To illustrate, Evans (1997: 62) defines stateness as “the institutional centrality of the
state” in terms of the “extent to which private power can … be checked by public authority”, that is,
he construes stateness solely as a matter of capacity. Elkins and Sides (2008: 2) instead argue that
“Understanding stateness therefore entails attention to the attitudes and identities of citizens, in
particular their attachment to the state”, that is, they perceive stateness solely to be a matter of
legitimacy or cultural acceptance. Finally, Bratton and Chang (2006: 1060) define stateness much
more broadly as “the bone structure of the body politic or the set of administrative institutions that
claim a legitimate command over a bounded territory” potentially including many diverse forms of
capacity and legitimacy.
6
I have carried out a more general review of the way stateness has entered comparative
politics,2 the results of which are presented in Table 1.
Table 1: Attributes of stateness included in extant definitions
Monopoly on violence
Administrative effectiveness
Citizenship agreement
Nettl (1968)
+
+
Tilly (1975a)
+
+
Bayley (1975)
+
Linz and Stepan (1996)
+
Evans (1997)
+
+
Fukuyama (2004)
+
+
UNDP (2004)
+
+
+
Bratton and Chang (2006)
+
+
+
+
Lindberg (2006)
+
Kraxberger (2007)
+
+
+
Tansey (2008)
+
Elkins and Sides (2008)
+
Carbone
and
Memoli
+
+
+
+
+
+
Lemay-Hébert (2009)
+
+
+
Migdal (2009)
+
(2008)
Kostovicova and BojicicDzelilovic (2009)
Møller
and
Skaaning
+
+
(+)
+
Sojo (2011)
+
+
+
Ilyin et al. (2012)
+
+
BTI (2012)
+
(2011)
+
Kurtz and Schrank (2012)
+
The mapping shows that all extant definitions of stateness include one or more of three defining
attributes that I have termed “monopoly on violence”, “administrative effectiveness”, and
“citizenship agreement”. Conveniently, each of the three attributes is defined in relatively similar
In practical terms, I searched for “stateness” in ProQuest, JStor, and Google Scholar and selected the hits that, within
the comparative politics literature, provided some discussion of the conceptualization of stateness.
2
7
ways by most scholars. Monopoly on violence is the “ability to … force people to comply with the
state’s laws” (Fukuyama 2004: 6); citizenship agreement is the absence of “profound differences
about the territorial boundaries of the political community’s state and profound differences as to
who has the right of citizenship in that state” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 17); and administrative
effectiveness is “the ability of states to plan and execute policies” (Fukuyama 2004: 7).3
These definitions should be understood against the background of some more general
distinctions. First, whereas democracy concerns access to power, the common denominator for all
three attributes of stateness is that they concern the exercise of power (Mazzucca 2010). However,
it is also important to note that stateness refers to the internal dimensions of the state as opposed to
the external (juridical) dimensions of the state. In other words, the overarching concept of stateness
does not concern the formal recognition by other states of a state’s sovereignty as a person of
international law, which is normally captured by the concept of “statehood” (Jackson and Rosberg
1982; Clapham 1998). Investigating the effects of statehood (and through that the effects of shifting
international sovereignty regimes) on democratic stability is therefore not a purpose of this
dissertation. To this end, I acknowledge Holsti’s (1995: 330) insight that today the security
problems of states of developing countries are mostly internal. Second, the stateness attributes
concern the power of state institutions and organizations which is in and of itself value-neutral. I
thus abstain from Marx-inspired definitions of the state as the blunt instrument of the capitalist
3
There is a proviso to this. Some accounts have been challenging to categorize. One group of definitions uses other
terms or connotations that I however believe can be subsumed under the heading of the three attributes. For instance, I
take Elkins and Sides’ (2008: 2) stateness-element of ‘attachment to the state’ as implying citizenship agreement.
Similarly, I interpret Nettl’s (1968: 579-580) definition of stateness as “saliency of the state” and his focus on the
central administration as a sectoral, specific, and technical matter in countries with high degree of stateness as
indications of monopoly on violence and administrative effectiveness. A second group includes an attribute at one place
while neglecting it at another indicating uncertainty about whether or not to include it in the stateness definition. For
instance, Linz and Stepan (1996: 16-17) begin by defining stateness as citizenship agreement in a state holding a
monopoly of violence, but in the theoretical framework and later empirical analyses, they treat citizenship agreement as
the most interesting aspect regarding democratic consolidation (Linz and Stepan 1996: 20-24). In such cases, I include
attributes that are present in the definition so as not to mistake the relevant scholars’ definition with their empirical
focus.
8
ruling class (Giddens 1980: 884). Besides, Marxist state definitions are rarely used in
democratization studies and are less relevant in rural or less developed countries (cf. Jessop 2002).
Bearing these distinctions in mind, two different approaches to defining stateness can
be identified in Table 1. Stateness is either conceived of as a matter of capacity, that is, a set of
coercive or administrative functions that must be carried out with a certain degree of effectiveness,
or as a matter of legitimacy, that is, an integrated whole – a body politics – perceived as legitimate
by its demos. The first approach is represented by Nettl’s (1968) original definition, it pervades
influential analyses such as Tilly (1975a) and Evans (1997: 62, 83), and it has recently been
resuscitated by Fukuyama (2004). Here, stateness is a product of a monopoly on violence and/or
administrative effectiveness. The other approach was inaugurated by Linz and Stepan (1996: 16,
20-24), who break with the traditional perspective in two ways. First, they sever the link between
stateness and the attribute of administrative effectiveness. Second, they introduce citizenship
agreement as a hitherto neglected attribute of stateness. More specifically, Linz and Stepan define
stateness as a product of monopoly on violence and citizenship agreement – but with most emphasis
on the latter attribute.
However, the most striking aspect of Table 1 is surely the massive heterogeneity in
terms of combining the three attributes. None of the three attributes are present in all the definitions
of the mapping. Of the 21 definitions reviewed, administrative effectiveness is included in 13,
whereas monopoly on violence and citizenship agreement are included in 17 and 14, respectively.
Citizenship agreement has been included in most definitions since Linz and Stepan’s (1996)
intervention and today seems to be perceived as the core attribute of the concept of stateness,
reflected in a growing number of analyses of democratic transition or stabilization focusing on
minority inclusion, border settlement, and the legitimating and integrative potential of the state
(e.g., Daskalovski 2004; Lindberg 2006; Kraxberger 2007; Dukalskis 2009; Lemay-Hébert 2009;
9
Sojo 2011; Møller and Skaaning 2011; Ilyin et al. 2012). On the other hand, some scholars (e.g.,
Evans 1997; Fukuyama 2004; Kurtz and Schrank 2012) still adhere to Nettl’s (1968) older
conception. More generally, no less than six of the nine logically possible combinations of the
defining attributes are represented in Table 1. Stateness is thus a term with many meanings.
Disentangling the stateness attributes
Most scholars would probably expect the three stateness attributes of monopoly on violence,
administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement to be empirically associated with each
other: Coercive and administrative powers are closely related phenomena (Mann 2003), states
capable of maintaining a monopoly on violence also tend to have no or only politically insignificant
citizenship disputes (Rokkan 1975: 578-579), and administratively effective states tend to foster
trust between the citizens and legitimate the state’s presence and jurisdiction (Gilley 2006;
Rothstein 2011). Nonetheless, the three properties of stateness capture aspects that are
fundamentally different in nature and their empirical co-variation is likely to be anything but
perfect.
The two most closely connected attributes are monopoly on violence and
administrative effectiveness, both of which have to do with capacity. In a very direct sense, they
concern to what extent and by what means states can exercise power across their territories.
Specifically, states are rarely administratively effective in their exercise of power without a
monopoly on violence. But as attributes of the state, monopoly on violence and administrative
effectiveness also differ in important ways: whereas monopoly on violence only concerns the
sovereignty of the state through the means of effective military and police forces, administrative
effectiveness concerns a qualitatively different type of capacity, namely, the power to regulate,
organize, and extract through the means of an effective bureaucracy (Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009: 2,
10
5). Even if the difference between the two attributes is not perfectly captured by Mann’s (2003:
115) seminal distinction between despotic and infrastructural power, we can at least say that there is
a wide gap between controlling society through basically violent means and controlling it through
peaceful compliance with general rules.
Even more important is the distinction between monopoly on violence and
administrative effectiveness on the one hand and citizenship agreement on the other hand. Whereas
monopoly on violence and administrative effectiveness are solely attributes of the state, citizenship
agreement is an attribute of both state and society in that it concerns the acceptance of different
population groups of being members of the same state. In effect, it concerns the popular legitimacy
of the state. The citizens’ attitudes towards the state are related to the exercise of state power in the
sense that no country can have citizenship agreement without there being some central state
authority to which the population refers. But citizenship agreement can surely be present without a
genuine monopoly on violence. States might be weak in coercive capacity and thus prone to (or at
least vulnerable in the face of) violent rebellions but still survive because of an entrenched
citizenship agreement which makes the incentives to rebel few and weak (Mann 2003). Much of
Western Europe exemplifies a development where the state has gradually withdrawn from more
despotic to more subtle forms of coercion and control as civil society groups have come to terms
with each other and the state while also building their own capacities (Mann 2003). Moreover,
many states are characterized by robust levels of citizenship agreement even though the state
apparatus lacks resources and is pervaded by patrimonialism. This was the case in Southern Italy
(Putnam 1993) and Brazil (Evans 1995). More generally, states continuously interact with their
populations with the aim of expanding or defending their authority, and the sequencing of state
capacity and citizenship agreement is therefore not straightforward (Tilly 1975a; Mann 1986;
Giddens 1987; Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore 1990: 102; Gill 2003).
11
Next, numerous states have been characterized by monopoly on violence or
administrative effectiveness but also by citizenship disputes (Mann 1986: Ch. 3). Many states have
been able to endure in spite of intense disagreements about how borders are drawn and which
populations should be included within these borders because of the state’s sheer coercive force and
the systematic use of state repression. Prominent examples of this are Spain and the Soviet Union
(Rokkan 1975; Fukuyama 2012; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Or one might take East Germany
during the Cold War, where the state penetrated society but at the same time severed the citizens
from fraternal West Germany, thereby undercutting its own legitimacy. In present-day Belgium,
administrative effectiveness also co-exists with significant citizenship disagreement (Oberschall
2011). The connection between state repression, state effectiveness, and citizenship agreement thus
cannot be established a priori (Gilley 2006; Davenport 2007).
The co-variation between monopoly on violence and citizenship agreement is
arguably different from the co-variation between administrative effectiveness and citizenship
agreement. Whereas many states with monopoly on violence have citizenship disputes, fewer states
boast administrative effectiveness in the face of such disputes. This is at least partly because of the
legitimizing consequences of administrative effectiveness. Perhaps this is most vividly illustrated by
East Asia where regimes have achieved legitimacy through economic performance and,
contrariwise, by Sub-Saharan African states suffering from illegitimacy because of dire economic
performance (Evans 1995; Englebert 2000). Furthermore, the increase in administrative
effectiveness was one of the developments paving the way for the strongly integrative and
legitimate national states of Western Europe (Tilly 1975a; Mann 1986: Chs. 13-14).
While it is evident that citizenship agreement does not follow logically from
monopoly on violence or administrative effectiveness, citizenship agreement needs to be further
separated from the concepts of historical state legitimacy and national identity. First, citizenship
12
agreement rightly regards the state’s legitimacy but is not necessarily an agreement about any precolonial culture, institutional framework, or conservative celebration of the past (cf. Englebert
2000). On the contrary, it can be established on the basis of old cultural communities and
completely new principles of solidarity and inclusion (Durkheim 2000: 138). Second, citizenship
agreement does not necessarily equal a strong national identity just as state does not equal nation
(Tilly 1975a; Mann 1986). There are broadly speaking two ways of building citizenship agreement:
“state-nation building” and “nation-state building” (cf. Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011). This
somehow is at odds with Holsti’s (1995) distinction between “historic-civic” and “natural” state
legitimacy but the idea is basically the same. A state-nation is multicultural and sometimes even has
significant multinational components but nonetheless still manages to engender strong identification
and loyalty from its citizens. It is crafted by normative integration as appropriate amounts of rights
to minorities allow the formation of a more general political community (Elkins and Sides 2008: 718; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011: 4). In this sense, state-nations are exemplified by the Roman
Empire and many other empires (Gill 2003: 49-52), by modern-day federations such as Germany
and USA, the republic of France, and by what has been termed consociational states such as India,
Switzerland, and Belgium (Lijphart 1969; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011).
Citizenship agreement can also be obtained through nation-state building. A nationstate privileges one socio-cultural group over others. In effect, this means matching the political
boundaries of the state with the cultural boundaries of the nation (Gellner 2006). Even though many
contemporary scholars see the process of nation-state building and the consequential nationalism as
impediments to citizenship agreement today (Habermas 1996: 133; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011:
2-11), the nation-state has historically been the most successful source of citizenship agreement.
The medieval European process of state formation through national conflicts was unique in many
respects and did not create pure nation-states but – provided that certain conditions are in place – it
13
still bears testimony to the possibility of creating citizenship agreement by means of nation-state
building (Tilly 1975b: 601-602).
There are of course numerous ways in which the citizens of a state show their
allegiance to the state. State legitimacy may thus rise through performance or because people are
given the right to political co-determination (cf. Scharpf 1998). However, these forms of legitimacy
are only indirectly connected with the state as they are manipulated by the economy in general and
political regimes. In contrast, citizenship agreement directly concerns a kind of legitimacy that it
constitutive of the state, namely the integration of various population groups (cf. Holsti 1995; Linz
and Stepan 1996; Mazzuca and Munck forthcoming). I therefore stick to citizenship agreement as
the source of state legitimacy.
Theoretical disaggregation
Based on the conceptual analysis, the advantages of disaggregating stateness into the three attributes
of monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement should be
evident. The three attributes of stateness are both different conceptually and they are unlikely to
cluster perfectly empirically. Such conceptual ambiguity is not necessarily problematical. Quite the
contrary, an equivocal term such as stateness might actually facilitate our understanding of the
state-democracy nexus by allowing scholars to elucidate it from different angles.
In other words, the main weakness of the literature included into Table 1 is not the
conceptual disagreement per se. However, it becomes problematic when the definitions bundle
together distinct aspects pertaining to the state which are likely to have different effects on regime
change or regime stabilization and/or to follow from different causes (cf. Munck 1996; Goertz
2006: 242-243; Mazzuca 2010: 336; Coppedge and Gerring et al. 2011: 251). This is a general trait
of the stateness literature and is neatly illustrated by Bratton and Chang (2006) analysis of the state-
14
democracy relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa. First, they underline that – at the core – the state is
nothing more than a coercive institution. But they still include citizenship agreement and
administrative effectiveness in the definition of stateness (Bratton and Chang 2006: 1066-1069).
Second, they examine the disaggregated effects of the stateness components on democracy,
concluding that stateness is a necessary condition for democracy: “democratization requires a set of
state structures that enforce law and order, respect human rights, respond to popular demands,
govern by constitutional means, and control official corruption” (Bratton and Chang 2006: 10761077). However, this conclusion neither sheds light on the interrelationships between the
constitutive attributes of stateness, nor on their relationship with democracy. Moreover, variables
such as “respect for human rights”, “response to popular demands”, and “government by
constitutional means” are treated as indicators of stateness, thereby producing near-tautological
relationships with democracy.
Taken together, a highly aggregated stateness concept hampers the theoretical
treatment of the causal relationship between stateness and democracy and rules out empirical
analyses of these relationships. I therefore argue that it is pertinent to proceed in a disaggregated
way, that is, by systematically interrogating the state-regime nexus with respect to each of the three
attributes of monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement.
Disaggregation makes it possible to first theorize and second investigate the independent causal
effect of each of these components. For instance, both monopoly on violence and administrative
effectiveness have been identified as relevant in explaining democratic stability (Skocpol 1979;
Bermeo 1997: 19; Fukuyama 2005), yet only by separating the two can we investigate whether they
do in fact have uniform effects. Note in this connection that much evidence points to a less
stabilizing effect of strongly coercive state power than of meritocratic bureaucracies capable of
15
delivering balanced economic development (Gasiorowski and Power 1998; Davenport 2007;
Rothstein 2011).
Turning to an equally telling example, Linz and Stepan’s (1996: Ch. 21) analysis of
democratic consolidation in Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe
conflates citizenship agreement with state capacity. They are therefore unable to investigate the
independent effects of monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship
agreement. The same can be said of Migdal’s (2009: 164-165) analytical framework for studying
the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and of the analyses of Linz and Stepan’s proselytes such as
Dukalski (2009: 948).4 This is problematic considering that, throughout modern democratic history,
democratic consolidation has not so much been hindered by societal conflicts as by popular
uprisings against resource-deprived and unskilled administrations (Bunce 2000: 713-714) –
something that can only be appreciated by distinguishing between the different attributes of
stateness.
Bearing in mind the disaggregated understanding of stateness and the recent
explanatory difficulties pertaining to the state-democracy relationship, my dissertation aims at
examining three causal relationships which are significantly different but are all fundamental
expressions of the state-democracy relationship. That is, I examine whether and how a state
monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement, respectively, affect
democratic stability. In the next sections, I account for how we should expect these three attributes
to relate to the chances of maintaining democracy. Specifically, I argue that administrative
effectiveness is expectedly the most stabilizing factor of stateness because it uniquely embeds
performance legitimacy in the democratic regime.
4
The non-tenable conflation of the state capacities and citizenship agreement also pertains to the literature on
democratic breakdowns in the interwar years. Here, explanations either conflate citizenship disputes and lack of
monopoly on violence (e.g., Aarebrot and Berglund 1995), assume citizenship disputes and resulting revolts to lead to
destruction of state monopoly on violence (e.g., Kopstein and Wittenberg 2010: 30), or treat societal state opposition as
a given while focusing one-sidedly on state capacities as explanation (e.g., Bermeo 2003).
16
Monopoly on violence and democratic stability
A monopoly on violence means that the state security forces, which enforce internal state
sovereignty, are united in protecting public order. A causal coupling of a state monopoly on
violence with democratic stability then rests on the insight that whereas democratic transitions
occur when the common people free themselves from the sovereignty of the existing elites, the then
installed democracy can only endure if the now liberated people are also controlled by some central
authority of which the state is the only potentially effective one (Dahl 1989: 47). The underlying
reason is rather simple: Since the ideal typical man desires power, democratic regimes would erupt
in civil war or coups if no common authority could provide some control.
Democratic instability, or breakdown, either results from a democratically elected
government that withdraws the popular right to be able to elect representatives for a national
legislative apparatus or from mass or elite driven groups that carry out a coup d’état. Such
circumstances often come about in a setting of public disorder (Loewenstein 1937; Tilly 2007: 19).
For democracy to function, the state security forces (i.e. the military and police) must safeguard
against violations of political and civil rights so as to ensure holding of peaceful elections (Giddens
1987: 202; Dahl 1989: 47). The mechanism connecting monopoly on violence and democratic
stability thus revolves around security forces which enforce containment of anti-systemic forces on
the ground-level. Some of the clearest examples of this are found in Interwar Europe. For instance,
the interwar trajectories of democratic Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Finland go to show that
democracies can overcome strong anti-systemic threats if the state is capable of enforcing the
democratic institutional rules (Bermeo 1997: 19-20; Capoccia 2005). Even in the post-Cold War
era, a strong police and security apparatus remains vital for guaranteeing stable electoral processes
in new democracies (Carothers 2007: 13; Fukuyama 2004: 8; Tilly 2007: 16-18).
17
Of course, the state’s coercive apparatus also matters in-between elections but its
importance depends on the social distribution of power. The ability to carry out a general
enforcement of the law throughout the state’s territory is crucial to avoid the breakdown of civic
order – especially in new democracies where ethnic or class-based conflicts may develop into
violent opposition against the existing regime or even civil war (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Tilly and
Tarrow 2007; Englehart 2009). For instance, the Kenyan state lost control in the aftermath of the
bloody 2007-election. This seriously jeopardized the regime by making the risk of a military coup
d’état loom (Kagwanja and Southall 2009). Though Kenya ultimately avoided such a scenario,
military dictatorships piggybacking on state disintegration and political chaos have been common
phenomena in post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa (Kposowa and Jenkins 1993). Similarly, many
regime breakdowns in Latin America from the 1960s through the 1980s were directly caused by the
inability of internally factionalized military forces to come together to protect the regime (Loveman
1999).
As these examples illustrate, democracies need coercive capacity to be able to weather
short-term political and social tempests. However, in the longer term, reliance on security forces to
maintain order in the face of recurrent challenges chips away at the legitimacy of the democratic
regime, especially where extrajudicial means are regularly employed.5 That is, democratic
institutions increase the costs of repression because governments are expected to be accountable to
their citizens in a much more direct sense than in autocracies where state repression is often used to
stabilize the regime (Davenport 2007: 10-14). Coercive capacity as such is regime neutral in that it
favors both democratic and autocratic stability (Skocpol 1979: 29; Holmes 1995) but over time, it is
5
Gasiorowski and Power (1998: 756, 760) have even shown that – in the context of developing countries – military
personnel/cap. goes from contributing to democratic consolidation to destabilizing democracies 12 years after the
inauguration of the new regime.
18
expectedly a weak stabilizer of democracies. We should thus not expect that a monopoly on
violence is the main factor responsible for the claimed stabilizing effect of stateness on democracy.
Citizenship agreement and democratic stability
I now turn to the arguably stronger stabilizing factor of citizenship agreement. First of all, it should
be mentioned that the proposed relationship has often been the opposite: democracy forges
integration of culturally and politically different groups. Indeed, this was one of the bearing
rationales of the Wilsonian agreement at Versailles in 1919 and the creation of a European Union
after the end of WWII (Anderson 1999). Conversely, some have argued that the great problem
underlying the weak governance of post-colonial African states has had more to do with
authoritarianism than with arbitrarily formed borderlines themselves (Ake 1996: 4-5). Yet possibly
strong feedback mechanisms do not undermine the existence of a strong relationship between
citizenship agreement and democratic stability in the first place. Studies of citizenship disputes and
its detrimental impact on democratic stability have been increasing since Linz and Stepan’s
intervention. Recently, Elkins and Sides (2008: 1) have deepened the understanding of this
relationship by noting that no democratic election and bargaining can be accomplished without
public support for the nation-state whose political arrangements the regime is regulating. With
certainty, population groups, which fundamentally do not want to be part of the same political
community, will disrespect arrangements meant to install one common government to rule them all.
Installing citizenship agreement decreases the need for coercive force in order to provide public
order. This is a very strong claim that first, however, needs to be disentangled into a convincing
causal mechanism.
The decisive link between citizenship agreement and democratic stability is
establishment of a basic solidarity between the individuals of the state that serves to safeguard
19
against extremists monopolizing political power. With citizenship agreement and thus a basic
solidarity or even strong social trust, people generally accept mutual dependency, and that political
problems can only be solved in communion (Giddens 1987: 204; Easterly and Levine 1997). In
other words, elections and the general political process of compromise function more easily when
all participants feel part of a ‘community of fate’ because they then respect each other’s political
liberties (Linz and Stepan 1996: 33-37; Gerschewski 2013: 20). Moreover, as all politicians will
have a fair chance of gaining political success without structural barriers such as cultural or ethnic
group membership, their incentive to defect the government or monopolize political power from an
oppositional position decreases (Easterly and Levine 1997). Finally, as mentioned, peaceful
relations between societal groups and their relations with the state as a regulating authority are so
fundamental that they are likely to underpin the recognition of the state as sovereign and the
successiveness of implementation of policies. Accordingly, citizenship agreement may stabilize
democracy indirectly through strengthening of monopoly on violence and administrative
effectiveness.
Many post-communist regimes are excellent examples of the problems of citizenship
disputes for democratic stability. The most clear-cut one is Czechoslovakia which almost
approximating a natural experiment tried to make democracy work but eventually had to split in
two. Whereas the culturally homogenous Czech Republic rather quickly consolidated its
democracy, Slovakia with its substantial Hungarian minority suffered from political conflict,
deadlocks, and extremist movements (Linz and Stepan 1996: 328-33).
Although any form of citizenship agreement stabilizes democracies, the stabilization
effect of the different forms likely varies. As politicians in new democracies struggle with
integration of conflicting population groups into the political system, they ask themselves what type
of state furthers peaceful and just integration (cf. Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011). As presented
20
earlier, citizenship agreement may arise in many different types of settings which likely have
different effects on democratic stability. For the sake of simplicity, I have distinguished between a
nation-state and a state-nation although there are many forms of political integration of culturally
different groups. Admitting the stability of democracy in ethnically homogenous countries such as
the Scandinavian ones means that there is no good theoretical reason to believe already established
nation-states to be less stable than established state-nations such as Switzerland. However, there is
good reason to believe that in states still struggling with legitimizing themselves through integration
of their citizenry, a strategy of nation-state building, that is, forced cultural unification or outright
cultural/ethnic exclusion, leads to regime illegitimacy and destabilization (Linz and Stepan 1996:
25; Wimmer 2013: 33). By contrast, state-nations facilitate respect for cultural differences and ease
compromises across cultural groups. This in turn hinders political power monopolization and thus
democratic reversal (Lijphart 1969: 211-215; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011: 10).
On the outset, citizenship agreement is thus a very strong stabilizer of democracy.
However, I believe that stating the relationship in such a deterministic way is an exaggeration. In
fact, some democracies such as Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998 (Bertrand 2004) have
survived years of citizenship disputes or outright civil war-like conditions admittedly with
democratic quality left in vain but with the basic democratic feature of a competitive and relatively
free and fair election kept intact. Particularly the Belgian case (cf. Oberschall 2011) illustrates that
antagonistic groups can peacefully speak together and negotiate democratic, political arrangements
if for instance an institutionalized and competitive party system manage the balance of including
and expelling extremist forces into the mainstream political system (Mainwaring and Scully 1995;
Kopstein and Wittenberg 2010). Even though citizenship agreement expectedly contributes strongly
to democratic stability and is in any way positive for democracy’s functionality, it can be
substituted for by inclusive elite-level institutions.
21
Administrative effectiveness and democratic stability
Administrative effectiveness is arguably the most important factor underlying the stabilizing effect
of stateness on democracy. It contrasts with a monopoly on violence in that it actually embeds the
regime in performance legitimacy and it contrasts with citizenship agreement in being irreplaceable
in the creation of this legitimacy. Just as with citizenship agreement, there are arguably feedback
mechanisms from democracy to administrative effectiveness. The installation of democracy tends to
legitimize the existence of a centralized bureaucracy with regulative authority, the common people
will likely assist more willingly in public goods provisions, and a democratic regime tends to recruit
a broader pool of people to fill political and administrative seats, which, ceteris paribus, increase
the quality of bureaucracy (Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009: 140-149). The sequencing of good
governance, a broadening of the concept of administrative effectiveness, and democracy is still
unsettled and should probably be conceived as simultaneously established conditions the absence of
each is negative for the other just as the presence of each is positive for the other (Santiso 2001: 6;
Bratton and Chang 2006). Here, I however only focus on one side of the equation, namely that
centered on the effect of administrative effectiveness.
The reason why an effective bureaucracy stabilizes democracy involves how any
political regime must satisfy its citizens’ economic needs in order to be legitimate. There are to
some extent trade-offs between a democratic regime resting on the legitimacy of protracted public
and elite negotiations and effective government (see, e.g., the literature on governance in the EU, cf.
Scharpf 1998). Compared to autocracies however, democracies remain to have the advantage that
they create (indeed rest on) vertical accountability established through the electoral channel (Bäck
and Hadenius 2008). Yet cross-regional surveys have shown that in new (as well as old)
democracies, the most important form of legitimacy, and thus source of stability, is not related to
22
democracy as principle but to performance, that is, the ability of the state to deliver public goods
such as economic development and redistribution (e.g., Gilley 2006; Chu et al. 2008). In new and
poor democracies, lack of performance legitimacy may lead to democratic breakdown by spurring
class-based conflicts or by radicalizing ethnic or secessionist groups (Lichbach 1982; Fjelde and de
Soysa 2009). When the government disposes of an effective bureaucracy, it tends to increase the
faith in the democratic regime because bureaucrats do not exploit public offices and people
recognize and count on its ability to contribute to social and economic betterment (Linz and Stepan
1978: 41; Suleiman 1999; Rothstein 2011: 95; Fukuyama 2013: 5-6). This is underscored by the
fact that economic growth has been shown to contribute to regime stability (Przeworski and
Limongi 1997) and that meritocratic bureaucracies have been shown to forge economic growth
(Evans and Rauch 1999). Additionally, as another component of performance legitimacy, an
effective bureaucracy is also important for securing that the democratic institutions, such as free and
fair elections, function effectively and peacefully (Elklit and Reynolds 2002: 92).
The mechanism connecting administrative effectiveness with democratic stability
therefore involves three processes: first, that bureaucrats implement (and perhaps even innovate)
policies that secure equitable economic growth (and/or secure peaceful, regulated, and accountable
elections); second, that the majority of the citizens evaluate this as a positive trait of the regime; and
third, that these citizens mobilize against anti-systemic forces to protect their economic (and/or
democratic) interests.
Just as coercive capacity, administrative capacity as such is regime neutral. That
administrative effectiveness stabilizes autocracies is vividly illustrated by contrasting the neopatrimonial, poor, and instable regimes of post-colonial Africa (Bratton and Van de Walle 1994)
with Southeast Asia where countries such as China (Nathan 2003), Malaysia (Case 1993), and
Singapore (Slater 2010) for long periods of time have used their infrastructural power to create
23
basic popular acceptance of dictatorial rule, not least through industrialization and impressive
growth rates. However, administrative effectiveness is arguably a stronger stabilizing factor in
democracies than brute force because, in contrast to states with pure coercive force,
administratively effective states “engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions
are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society” (Lipset 1959: 86).
To illustrate the different effects of monopoly on violence and administrative
effectiveness, take post-World War II Colombia. Here, guerilla groups undermining state
sovereignty have not in themselves been the greatest challenge to democracy (Acemoglu, Robinson,
and Santos 2013). The big democratic problem in Colombia, as in most other Latin American
countries, is old patterns of corrupt, patrimonial bureaucratic rule which have been largely
responsible for a poor record of economic performance in general and of wealth distribution in
particular (O’Donnell 1988; Mainwaring and Scully 2010: 368).
Also, administrative effectiveness is arguably a stronger stabilizing factor than
citizenship agreement for democracy. Both performance legitimacy and intergroup solidarity are
important sources of democratic stability. However, in contrast to citizenship agreement which may
be substituted by an institutionalized party system in creating the minimum of intergroup solidarity
at the elite level, there is no substitution for administrative effectiveness in creating performance
legitimacy. Even with innovative businesses and citizens with a strong work ethic, a central,
coordinating apparatus is needed to create and sustain economic development (Evans 1995).
Similarly, high levels of development assistance or vast natural assets for the state apparatus could
be used for economic growth creation but these resources are often used for private purposes or are
inefficiently administered precisely because of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats (Sandbrook
1986; Cammack 2007). Administrative effectiveness holds the advantages of being an irreplaceable
cause of the performance legitimacy so important for democratic stability.
24
In sum, I expect all three versions of stateness to stabilize democracy. However, such a claim is
highly imprecise. A monopoly on violence in and of itself does not entail any kind of legitimacy,
neither of the state nor the regime, which means that it will only stabilize democracy in the short
run and is in any case a risky strategy for a democratic government. Citizenship agreement creates
the solidarity between population groups and the state legitimacy that may erase the need for
coercive force in the first place thus stabilizing democracy in the longer term. However, citizenship
disputes and stable democratic rule prevail in many countries because of substitutive inclusion by
the party system. On the contrary, administrative effectiveness provides the regime with long-term
legitimacy while being the only real factor capable of doing so. Therefore, I expect administrative
effectiveness to be primarily responsible factor for the stabilizing effect of stateness on democratic
stability. Figure 1 presents these propositions in a simple model that I examine in the dissertation.
Figure 1: Relationships between stateness and democratic stability
Capacity
Administrative
Effectiveness
Legitimacy
Stateness
Monopoly on Violence
+
+
Democratic Stability
+
Citizenship Agreement
25
Studying the state-democracy relationship empirically
I have made a strong call for conceptual and theoretical disaggregation of the state-democracy
relationship. I now finally set up a framework for empirical analysis of it within the scope of my
Ph.D. dissertation. To be able to answer the overarching research question of whether and how the
state is related to democratic stability, I argue that comparisons across time and space are necessary
to avoid getting biased snap-shots of the empirical patterns that we are analysing. The main purpose
of comparing is that it allows us to control (Sartori 1991). This point holds regardless of whether I
do cross-temporal or cross-spatial comparisons and regardless of whether small-N or large-N
comparisons are marshalled. Only by including periods and contexts in which our core variables
show significant variation can we get an adequate grasp of relevant relationships and boost external
validity. I also argue that within-case analysis of a few, but carefully chosen cases, is needed in
order to bolster the internal validity of the relationships.
It follows from this that an exhaustive treatment of the state-democracy relationship
would require systematic comparisons of the association between the three attributes of stateness
and democratic development in the entire period in which modern democracy has been in existence.
Due to current data limitations, especially with regard to measuring the state (cf. Van de Walle
2005; Hendrix 2010; Saylor 2013), it is of course unrealistic to conduct an analysis of such an
ambitious scope in any one paper or even in a dissertation. However, I believe that the research
question may be answered by identifying more confined historical periods and regions of particular
interest. Specifically, I will be interested in cases of democratic survival and breakdown in periods
of different international contexts. The most basic and common scope condition for all countries is
perhaps the international system. If I only analyze, say, the late Interwar period, I might derive
misleading conclusions about democratic stability for the simple reason that domestic relationships
were affected by the diffusional forces of Hitler’s Germany and the systemic clash between
26
democracies and autocracies. Regime dynamics are indeed very different in today’s post-Cold War
world (Schedler 1998; Boix 2011).
Whereas some analyses may be carried out with statistical tools, some, i.e. small-N
studies, cannot. It is worth pointing out that in small-N studies the logic of control can be pursued in
different ways. One may use more “classical” comparative-historical approaches in the form of
focused comparisons of a few cases (cf. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Capoccia and Ziblatt
2010) or process tracing in one very specific case to further examine the mechanisms assumed to be
drive the relationships in the larger-N analyses (cf. George and Bennett 2005: Ch. 10). Furthermore,
small-N and large-N studies often enrich each other. Studying the processes and specific
mechanisms which connect various aspects of stateness and political regime developments may
both benefit from and contribute to cross-case knowledge of the state-democracy relationship.
Finally, apart from the above methodological considerations, I need a comprehensive
framework that explains democratic stability to appreciate the causal role of the state. It is not only
interesting to examine the size of the effect of the stateness attributes but also what conditions their
effect and how they interact with other variables in stabilizing democracy. The most important
competing and complementary explanations to a state-centred one are: level of socioeconomic
development (cf. Przeworski et al. 2000), economic crisis (cf. Svolik 2008), dense civil society (cf.
Putnam 1993; Ertman 1998), and an institutionalized party system (cf. Mainwaring and Scully
1995; Ertman 1998). I aim to elaborate on the relationship between stateness and these other factors
in the relevant papers.
Suggestive outline of the dissertation
27
I plan to make an article-based dissertation. Table 2 outlines the articles that I currently suggest to
undertake. This outline is open-ended and I will continuously revise it due to new insights or
inspirations from writing the articles.
The first article6 introduces to the field of research, that is, the state-democracy
relationship, with which the dissertation deals. Since the main weaknesses of this literature are
conceptual and theoretical, I have conducted a conceptual analysis of the sort presented in this
paper. This is the basis for the rest of the dissertation, including the theoretical propositions to be
made. I also here suggest all the empirical analyses to have explicit comparative purposes.
However, a general trait is that indicators of state strength (and stateness in particular) are generally
weakly comparable and do not extend very far back in time. This basic data problem affects the
methods of the particular articles. Even though I aim to design my analyses so as to be able to make
valid inferences for all newly democratized countries across time and space, the dissertation thus
mostly makes use of small-N and medium-N methods and has a stronger qualitative edge.
A somewhat chronological order of the dissertation will hopefully work as a reader’s
guide to understanding of the analytical points. Therefore, I start the empirical part of the
dissertation by investigating the conditions for democratic survival and breakdown in the interwar
years, focusing on the Great Depression in particular. The interwar period is well-suited for
conducting such an analysis that may form the basis of further empirical analyses. First, the interwar
period represents the first and hitherto most dramatic reverse wave of democratization in modern times
(Huntington 1991: 14). Much can be learned from such a global and intense process in terms of the
basic prerequisites of democracy. It constitutes the historical foundation upon which prospects of
democracy today can be evaluated (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010: 932). Second, the interwar period, and
especially the Great Depression, not only witnessed several democratic breakdowns but also a
6
This article has been the base of this paper, is currently in review, and to be published in Democratization September
2014.
28
significant number of survivals. This raises the comparative potential of studying the trajectory of the
democracies that were or came to being immediately after WWI when they were confronted with the
devastating economic crisis of the Great Depression. Third, the period approximates a natural
experiment as it is clearly demarcated by two world wars which set it apart from earlier and later
developments. While the economic crisis of the 1930s constituted a scope condition that every
democracy had to deal with and thus can be held as a constant (Bermeo 1997; Ertman 1998: 476-477),
WWI and the peace settlement at Versailles was the stimuli that set some but not all countries off on
state- and nation-building paths that would destabilize democracy (Aarebrot and Berglund 1995;
Aldcroft 2006: Ch. 3).
In my master’s thesis, which I wrote on this particular subject, I studied the conditions 7
for democratic survival for all democracies in 1919 globally throughout the whole interwar period using
crisp-set QCA and found that democratic survival could only be obtained by a combination of a
monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, a dense civil society, and an institutionalized
party system. In the dissertation’s Article 2, I narrow down my focus to studying only the so-called
“swing states” during the Great Depression. I elaborate on this in the last section of this paper.
The third article will constitute the most comprehensive study of the state-democracy
relationship in the dissertation. In an analysis of democratic transitions and reversals from 19802000, Haggard and Kaufman (2012) reject various suggestive explanations pointing to
redistributional conflicts. They conclude by hypothesizing some alternative causal paths: “there
might be other economic and institutional factors that condition the capacity of low-income groups
to engage in collective action” (Haggard and Kaufman 2012: 496). With the use of Causal Process
Observations (cf. Haggard and Kaufman 2012; for a similar approach, see also Ross 2008), I aim to
examine the causal processes leading to democratic breakdown inferring to all democratic
7
I examined the validity of all three stateness attributes, dense civil society, and an institutionalized party system.
Economic crisis could largely be held at constant but was integrated in small within-case studies of the cases as a
potential confounder. Other confounders (analyzed as antecedent conditions) were: the existence of a diversified
economy and ethnic polarization.
29
breakdown cases from 1946 till today. Dichotomous coding of democracies and autocracies in this
period is available from Boix, Miller, and Rosato (2012) (data from 1800-2007), Cheibub, Gandhi,
and Vreeland (2009) (1946-2008), and Geddes, Wright, and Frantz (2013) (1946-2010). The
purpose is double: to understand the causes of breakdown and to investigate specifically the causal
role of the state, that is, the three stateness attributes, which could very likely give substance to
Haggard and Kaufman’s hypotheses. Therefore, I specifically test some causal mechanisms which
we should expect to connect each of the three stateness attributes with democratic breakdown. I
compare the findings with the causes of democratic breakdown in the interwar period (Article 2)
and thus reuse the theoretical framework by focusing on the confounding or conditioning effect of
civil society, the party system, economic development and crisis as well as shifting international
contexts.
Causal Process Observations includes two stages: (1) within-case analysis and coding
of cases on specific variables of the process leading to the breakdown and (2) aggregation across the
population of cases. Instead of assessing mean effects of the explanatory variables, the final
analytical stage is thus to investigate whether the path to democratic breakdown conforms to the
causal process stipulated in the theoretical model (Haggard and Kaufman 2012: 498-499). The
reasons for using Causal Process Observations are both pragmatic and idealistic. Pragmatically, data
limitations on the stateness variables are severe when going further back than 2003 (cf. BTI 2012).
Even though rough proxies are available, it is much easier, precise, and thus more fruitful to make
use of case-specific knowledge when coding. Idealistically, the severe shortcomings of the literature
concern finding robust causal mechanisms that make us believe in the validity of the claim that a
strong state is necessary for democratic stability. Scholars have found significant correlations but no
robust mechanisms across time and space.
30
The fourth article8 delves into the two attributes of stateness that regard capacity,
namely monopoly on violence and administrative effectiveness. Specifically, it investigates whether
the state is indeed as two-edged sword as proposed by political theorists, that is, it investigates the
regime-neutrality of these two capacities as well as the alleged stronger stabilizing effect of
administrative effectiveness in democracies. To determine whether a country has experienced
autocratic or democratic breakdowns, Geddes, Wright, and Frantz’s (2013) Autocratic Regimes
Dataset is employed. Although the indicators of state capacity are proxies and could be misleading,
the findings suggest that, after controlling for level of GDP/capita, a monopoly on violence
(measured as military expenditure/cap.) is only a strong stabilizer in autocracies whereas
administrative effectiveness (measured using ICRG’s Bureaucratic Quality indicator) is only a
strong stabilizer in democracies. This casts doubt on both state capacities being completely regimeneutral.
Articles 5 and 6 delve into the effect of citizenship agreement. According to Wimmer
(2013: 33), the end of ethnic exclusion, as a form of citizenship disagreement, should greatly
increase the chances of democratization. However, it is not given that democratic governments will
prevent renewed ethnic exclusion. Elaborating on this insight, this means that formerly ethnic
exclusionary countries which have recently embarked on a path toward democracy are in great risk
of reverting back to state repression and autocracy due to grievances among the excluded
population and the protective measures employed in effect by the incumbents (Gurr 2000: Ch. 3).
Article 5 thus analyzes whether and how regimes with former exclusion of majority ethnic groups
can become democratic and sustain the democratic rule. Ethnic exclusion may be measured using
data from Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (2010) and the existence of a state-nation while democratic
may be measured by rough proxies such as the number and cultural width of parties represented in
8
This article has been the base of this paper, is currently in review, and to be published in Democratization September
2014.
31
parliament. We choose a few cases which have managed to stabilize democracy for within-case
analysis of how this has come about with specific interest in the role of citizenship agreement.
Accordingly, this study enables assessment of the detrimental effects of a weak nation-state but also
enables investigation of possible ways out of citizenship disputes and democratic instability, for
instance by employing state-nation building.
Article 6 focuses on the contemporary debate spurred by Stepan, Linz, and Yadav
(2011) the take-off of which is that the functionality and success of democracies may be attributed
directly to their success as state-nation builders and that the creation of Swiss-like state-nations can
travel to any context because they can be crafted by specific policies and designs (Stepan, Linz, and
Yadav 2011: 8). However, the Swiss and Indian state- and nation-building trajectories are so unique
that it is perhaps dangerous to prescribe these as models to follow everywhere. For instance, the
problems of democratic instability in West African states such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the
Ivory Coast, where ethnic tensions have been huge since decolonization, may be very different in
terms of weak state coercive capacity, bureaucratic performance, or party system institutional
deficiencies (e.g., Bratton and Van de Walle 1994). Although the idea of forging identification with
a common state across different cultural groups seems compelling in its many basic effects on
politics, concrete challenges may differ. I thus aim to compare the context specific to Switzerland at
the time of its state-nation building with the context of present West African states which
experience democratic instability amidst struggling with violent societal conflicts and low state
legitimacy.
A concluding chapter of the dissertation will put the pieces together, evaluate the
current state-democracy literature as well as the specific one on stateness, and suggest areas for
future research.
32
Table 2: A suggestive outline of the Ph.D. dissertation
Article
Working title
Description
Author(s)
1 (in
The State-Democracy Nexus: Conceptual
Introduction to the study of the state-democracy relationship; conceptual analysis of
David Andersen, Jørgen Møller, and
review)
Distinctions, Theoretical Perspectives, and
“stateness”; analytical/explanatory disadvantages of aggregation of stateness concept;
Svend-Erik Skaaning
Comparative Approaches
suggestions for a comparative approach
2 (in
Stateness and Democratic Stability during the
Comparative-historical analysis of the conditions for democratic survival and breakdown
progress;
Great Depression
among “swing-states” during the Great Depression; the interaction between stateness, civil
master
David Andersen
society, and the party system
thesis)
3
States in Processes of Democratic
Use of Causal Process Observations to analyze democratic breakdowns during the second
Destabilization: The Reverse Waves
reverse wave and in the Post-Cold War period; comparison with interwar cases of
Compared
democratic breakdown; the interaction between stateness (including the two forms of
David Andersen
citizenship agreement), economic crisis and development level, civil society, and the party
system; control via the design for effect of the international context; case illustrations
4 (in
State Capacity and Political Regime Stability:
Large-N, statistical analysis of the role of state capacity in securing autocratic as well as
David Andersen, Jørgen Møller,
review)
A Two-edged Sword?
democratic stability; the independent effects of the two state capacities and evaluation of
Svend-Erik Skaaning, and Lasse
their regime neutrality
Lykke Rørbæk
Prospects of Democratization and Democratic
Analysis of former ethnically exclusivist countries’ transition paths and of their
David Andersen and Lasse Lykke
Stability with an Exclusivist Past
consolidation paths depending on the types of citizenship agreement; possibly large-N,
Rørbæk
5
statistical analysis comparing regime stability in non-exclusionary and exclusionary
countries; coupling with a few in-depth case studies
6
Types of Citizenship Agreement and
Investigating whether ethnic diversity is the problem behind democratic instability in West
Democratic Stability: From Continental
Africa and whether the state-nation model of Continental Europe can travel to ethnically
Europe to West Africa?
diverse West African democracies; comparison of historical cases (Continental Europe)
and present cases (West Africa) of democratization amidst state- and nation-building
33
David Andersen
Outline of Article 2
Despite recent upheavals of studies of interwar democratic stability, no general, that is,
comparatively valid, explanation for why some of the world’s democracies broke down while some
others survived has been established. In this paper, I take as my point of departure the latest
comprehensive efforts in this regard by Ertman (1998), Bermeo (2003), Capoccia (2005), Capoccia
and Ziblatt (2010), Weyland (2010), and Boix (2011). Specifically, I part with Capoccia and
Ziblatt’s thesis that in the so-called “swing states” democratic survival was, at the end of the day,
completely determined by actors’ contingent choices. Instead, I continue the line of thought of
classical comparative-historical scholars such as Tilly (1975a), Rokkan (1975), and Ertman (1997)
whose broad analyses of European political development highlight the essential importance of
structural factors in explaining the systematic variation across Europe, where Northwestern
democracies survived and Eastern, Southern, and Central European democracies broke down (cf.
Møller 2013). To this geographical pattern, one might add that the democracies of former British
colonies (USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) survived while democracies of former
Spanish colonies broke down (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992). However, I also take
into account the impact of WWI and the Versailles Treaty’s principles of new states and selfdetermination of national minorities (cf. Rothschild 1974; Aldcroft 2006).
In the most recent contribution to the debate on interwar democratic stability,
Capoccia and Ziblatt present the view that historical research should regain strength in
democratization studies. Among other cases, they, inspired by Linz and Stepan’s (1978) study, base
this on observations of processes of democratic stabilization in interwar Europe which they claim
was caused by three factors. First, more than class-cleavages democratic (in)stability was a result of
the handling of ethnic or religious cleavages. Second, ideas mattered. Diffusion of ideas through
networks of mutual learning between independent actors accounts for the geographical clustering of
34
democratic survival and breakdown, respectively. Third, the party system and the individual parties
had profoundly stronger effects than hitherto assumed. Parties and their interaction developed the
ideas and policies that were significantly different between democratic survivors and casualties. The
governments of the democratic survivors produced policies to combat anti-systemic forces while
the governments of the casualties passively led extremists capture the political process and
eventually political power (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010: 946-949).
I disagree with each of these interpretations of the interwar democratic trajectories in
the following sense. First, as is rightly noted by Kopstein and Wittenberg (2010), ethnic tensions
within the new states forged at Versailles in 1919 have largely been ignored since analyses have
focused on class-cleavages and interactions in effect largely ignoring the trajectories of Eastern
Europe and states of former empires. However, as this insight reveals, the challenges of national
minority inclusion are better conceived of as structural factors rather than phenomena that could be
manipulated by actors. Second, ideas were diffused by networks acting across borders. Weyland
(2010) rightly notes how diffusion plays a significant part in accounting the geographical clustering
of cases. However, as he also notes, the ways in which and the degree to which ideas could travel
from country to country vary with the national context. For instance, fascist ideas were in some
places successfully replicated, in other places blockaded (see also, Mann 2004: 43). Just as the
national context must take the international one largely as a given, so are international ideational
trends formed by the national discourse. I here focus on the national context. Third, the argument
that ideas were forged in the minds of party politicians acting on a tabula rasa seems unconvincing.
As the geographical pattern implies, such a contingent argument is weak in explaining the
systematic variation of ideas across countries. The question thus remains why governments and
“bording parties” in the survivor cases held genuinely more democratic attitudes than governments
35
in the casualty cases. Where did the democratic ideas of French politicians as opposed to the
weakly democratic attitudes of Germany’s Hindenburg stem from?
In the paper, I investigate the causes of the differing records of democratic breakdown
and survival among six cases: Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, and Uruguay.
These were all “swing states” because they experienced considerable anti-systemic pressure from
within or outside the political system against the democratic government. On comparison, they
contrast with “safe-home” democracies such as the Scandinavian ones, United Kingdom,
Netherlands, Switzerland, and the Neo-Europes and the “doomed” democracies of Southeastern and
Eastern Europe (cf. Mann 2004: 38-40; Capoccia 2005: 7).9 To simplify the analysis, I limit my
analysis to the period under the Great Depression starting in 1929 and continuing through to WWII.
First, this makes for controlling for the influence of the structure of the international system which
gradually became less democratic during the 1920s and decisively turned anti-democratic in 1933
with Hitler’s takeover in Germany. This pressured all democracies alike during the Great
Depression (Boix 2011: 823). While I acknowledge the relevance of the economic crisis as a trigger
cause of anti-systemic movements, it has been shown that crisis-level and level of socioeconomic
development (that is, the existence of a strong middle class) are insufficient in explaining
democratic stability (Bermeo 1997; Ertman 1998). Rather, what mattered was whether and how the
state apparatus and the political system as such reacted to the crisis and the degree to which antisystemic forces could rise and gain significance in the first place (Bermeo 1997: 19-20; de
Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O’Rourke 2012).
To put substance to the geographical pattern of democratic breakdown and survival,
which is important in reaching a satisfying explanation (Møller 2013: 701), my working hypothesis
9
Other possible swing states such as Belgium, Italy, and the Latin American democracies of Argentina and Chile could
be explored. Italy however experienced its breakdown many years before the Great Depression (in 1922) while Belgium
was comparatively a somewhat weak version of a swing state that could rather belong to the Northwestern family (cf.
Mann 2004: 41; Capoccia 2005: 14). Similar lines as in Uruguay could be drawn when assessing the breakdown causes
in Argentina and Chile but, for the sake of focus, at most I only use these as “shadow cases” for comparison.
36
is that a conjunction of factors separate the survivors from the casualties. The democratic survivors
either had or developed gradually through the 1920s a dense civil society and an institutionalized
party system as well as administrative effectiveness and a monopoly on violence. These factors
were each necessary but only in conjunction sufficient for democratic survival to result from the
societal conflicts of the Great Depression. Democracies needed not only a genuine democratic
attitudinal edge and determination among their elites and populations, they also basic state capacity
and authority to enforce the anti-systemic laws of the elites and fight the economic crisis by
administrative means.
Germany suffered from a weakly institutionalized and polarized party system and a
disunited state security apparatus (Ertman 1998: 502-503; Bermeo 2003: 35-41) which produced
the deeply incapable and passive leadership of Hindenburg, von Papen, and von Schleicher that
invited Hitler to power by constitutional and democratic means. By comparison, Spain’s democracy
ended in civil war in 1936 because the democratic trend was not that prevalent among Spain’s
military, conservatives, and middle-classes (Mann 2004: Ch. 9) and because the administration led
the economic crisis slip out of hand only worsening the ideological conflict between communists
and fascists (Lapuente and Rothstein 2010). Finally, Terra’s initiative to install a softly
authoritarian regime in Uruguay in 1933 to make the political system more effective and reinstall
public order came about because of an institutionalized yet malfunctioning party system and a
patrimonial, corrupt administration whose origins can be traced back to the Spanish conquerors
(Lindahl 1962: 185; González 1991: 7, 35).
I set up a comprehensive historical analysis of each swing state focusing on the
origins and development of the four factors identified. While doing this, I maintain a comparative
focus on the basis of the logic of comparative control. Even though the aim is to develop a general
37
explanation, I also am aware of contingent effects, which contribute to explaining for instance the
survivals of Czechoslovakian and Finnish democracy.
38
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