Out of the frying pan into the fire?
Keywords
No Thumbnail Available
Authors
Issue Date
2019-01-02
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
The global trends of political regimes have always been an important field of study in political science. However, much of the focus has solely been on democratization, instead of democratic breakdown. With the current international political climate in which certain democracies seem to reverse, we analyze the conditions under which democracies break down. By doing so, this thesis contributes to a more comprehensive knowledge of the decay of democracies by performing a cox proportional hazards test into democratic breakdown after a civil war, while controlling for certain institutional, economic and civil war covariates. We build on the extensive civil war and democratization literature that is available and carefully apply these findings to democratic breakdown. Through a dataset that we build, we apply a number of covariates to democratic breakdown. The most important covariates are a number of dummy variables for each of the different civil war outcomes, namely a rebel victory, a government victory and a peace treaty. Our analysis shows that peace treaties have a better effect on democratic survival rates than other forms of civil war settlement. However, none of the civil war settlement effects remain statistically significant when we control for our other covariates. Our main finding lies in the significance of a recurrent democratic breakdown. This phenomenon has hardly been studied and requires more academic attention.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen