The article investigates the consequences of post‐Cold War regime transitions on human development in the former Soviet bloc. Relying on a mixed‐methods research strategy that combines econometric and qualitative comparative analysis, it proceeds through three consecutive steps. First, there is a discussion of how democratic institutions may solicit governments’ attention toward social issues. Second, the relationship between democratisation and human development in 21 post‐communist countries is tested. Third, democracy in its core attributes is unpacked, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is used to identify a few alternative institutional configurations favouring human development. The analysis reveals that not only full democracies, but also some hybrid regimes, have been successful in this task.

Authoritarian incumbents routinely use democratic emulation as a strategy to extend their tenure in power. Yet, there is also evidence that multiparty competition makes electoral authoritarianism more vulnerable to failure. Proceeding from the assumption that the outcomes of authoritarian electoral openings are inherently uncertain, it is argued in this article that the institutionalisation of elections determines whether electoral authoritarianism promotes stability or vulnerability. By ‘institutionalisation’, it is meant the ability of authoritarian regimes to reduce uncertainty over outcomes as they regularly hold multiparty elections. Using discrete‐time event‐history models for competing risks, the effects of sequences of multiparty elections on patterns of regime survival and failure in 262 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010 are assessed, conditioned on their degree of competitiveness. The findings suggest that the institutionalisation of electoral uncertainty enhances authoritarian regime survival. However, for competitive electoral authoritarian regimes this entails substantial risk. The first three elections substantially increase the probability of democratisation, with the danger subsequently diminishing. This suggests that convoking multiparty competition is a risky game with potentially high rewards for autocrats who manage to institutionalise elections. Yet, only a small number of authoritarian regimes survive as competitive beyond the first few elections, suggesting that truly competitive authoritarianism is hard to institutionalise. The study thus finds that the question of whether elections are dangerous or stabilising for authoritarianism is dependent on differences between the ability of competitive and hegemonic forms of electoral authoritarianism to reduce electoral uncertainty.

Echoing the call for ‘no taxation without representation’, the development of modern taxation went hand‐in‐hand with Western democratisation. However, taxation appears to have lost its role in the third wave of democratisation. Unlike early democratisers, contemporary autocracies tend to introduce a ready‐made modern taxation system before democratisation. With advice from international organisations, the value added tax (VAT), which mature democracies innovated, has been adopted for economic adjustment and development in globalised markets. Despite these divergences, it is argued in this article that a fundamental relationship between taxation and representation remains. Taxation inherently involves a social contract between revenue‐seeking rulers and citizens, and thus involves their bargaining over representation. Therefore, the production of state revenue intervenes in contemporary democratisation as well. By factoring in the effect of the VAT in 143 developing countries between 1960 and 2007, an entropy‐balancing analysis has confirmed its important role in contemporary democratisation. The taxation‐democratisation linkage has travelled from early to contemporary democratisation.

International sanctions are one of the most commonly used tools to instigate democratisation in the post‐Cold War era. However, despite long‐term sanction pressure by the European Union, the United States and/or the United Nations, non‐democratic rule has proven to be extremely persistent. Which domestic and international factors account for the regimes' ability to resist external pressure? Based on a new global dataset on sanctions from 1990 to 2011, the results of a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) provide new insights for the research on sanctions and on authoritarian regimes. Most significantly, sanctions strengthen authoritarian rule if the regime manages to incorporate their existence into its legitimation strategy. Such an unintended ‘rally‐round‐the‐flag’ effect occurs where sanctions are imposed on regimes that possess strong claims to legitimacy and have only limited economic and societal linkages to the sender of sanctions.

Political science has been detached from philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular. The latter has also ‘celebrated its purity’. But should political philosophy cooperate with empirical political science? This article argues that since political philosophy is part of the study of politics, if it does not cooperate, political philosophy might lose its relevance, create a distorted notion of politics, and commit a methodological mistake. It is further argued that democratising political philosophy is the way to encourage such cooperation.

This article discusses the extent to which it is possible to label European integration as a new critical juncture of politics in Central Europe by using four Central European countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as the focus of our investigation. The article presents the historical critical junctures of Central European efforts to liberalise and democratise politics and to create liberal democratic political institutions: the Revolution of 1848, the emergence of independent states in 1918, the Sovietisation of Central Europe between 1945–48 and democratic transition after 1989. We argue that after 2004, when the Central European countries entered the European Union (EU), the claims related to the liberal democratic nature of the EU polity triggered nationalist and illiberal opposition. Therefore, the EU membership has provided a new critical juncture impacting the consolidation or destabilisation of liberal democratic patterns of government. The article further argues that path dependence on the previous critical junctures of Central European politics plays a role in the political development of these countries’ stance on European integration. The authors show that there has been a contradiction between nationalism and liberal concept of democracy since the mid-nineteenth century and that this contradiction manifests in critical junctures based on European integration too.

Economic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re‐elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti‐incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.

In traditional approaches to the history of political ideas, the history of democracy is uniformly studied concerning the point of departure, selection of canonical texts, etc. The paper introduces the Koselleckian conceptual history approach (Begriffsgeschichte) and the principle of a broader selection of texts than in the traditional history of ideas to provide a fuller account of usages of the concept, thereby opening up for alternative conceptions of the inventions and development of democracy.

Scholars continue to debate whether economic development affects regime type. This article argues that a clear relationship exists between development and the electoral component of democracy, but not – or at least less so – between development and other components of broader understandings of democracy. This is so because development enhances the power resources of citizens and elections provide a focal point for collective action. The theory is tested with two new datasets – Varieties of Democracy and Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy – that allow us to disaggregate the concept of democracy into meso‐ and micro‐level indicators. Results of these tests corroborate the theory: only election‐centred indicators are robustly associated with economic development. This may help to account for apparent inconsistencies across extant studies and shed light on the mechanisms at work in a much‐studied relationship. Further analysis shows that development affects electoral democracy by reducing electoral fraud, election violence and vote buying.

By comparing and analysing four cross-national measures of democracy, this article provides novel information regarding the statistical properties, convergence, and interchangeability of some of the most frequently used measures of democracy. The author points out limitations related to the statistical properties of these measures and finds that even if measures of democracy are highly convergent, their interchangeability is weak. This means that the choice of the measure of democracy has considerable consequences for the conclusions of a given study. Especially so in studies covering the last few decades, because the author finds that in general the interchangeability of democracy measures has decreased since the 1980s. In choosing one measure over another, scholars should be aware of the limitations identified in this article. To overcome problems related to weak interchangeability, if a single measure cannot be credibly chosen on theoretical grounds, the author recommends users of the measures to validate their findings with multiple measures of democracy.

The article explores the development and institutionalisation of political science in Romania after 1989. It argues that, despite a rapid process of expansion and institutionalisation, the emergence of political science as an internationally competitive discipline has been fundamentally affected by two types of factors: communist legacies and systemic under-investment in teaching and research.

Establishing civilian control of the military is an important challenge for new democracies. Surprisingly, however, there is no established conceptual framework for understanding what civilian control entails and how exactly weak or absent civilian control impinges upon democratic quality. This article addresses these lacunae, developing a new concept of civilian control for emerging democracies. It proposes to understand civilian control as the situation in which civilians have decision-making power in all relevant political matters. Differentiating civilian control as consisting of five decision-making areas, this new concept allows for a nuanced analysis of civilian control and comparative analysis. It also provides a comprehensive framework for systematically assessing the impact of incomplete civilian control on the various dimensions of liberal democracy.

This article introduces a discussion on defining, measuring, and assessing the quality of democracy. Providing a short overview of the papers of the Symposium, it places them within a broader context of current academic debate on various methodological, theoretical, and policy outreach dimensions of the topic.

Transitional justice (TJ) emerged during the consolidation of the liberal international order (the LIO). It was deemed to flow from, and contribute to, the emergence of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in post-authoritarian and post-conflict states. The LIO generated material and discursive support for processes of accountability, truth, repair and guarantees of non-repetition. The LIO is now widely perceived to be under significant threat with the rise of authoritarian states (most notably China and a revanchist Russia) and the erosion of liberal democratic values in the US and Europe. Some worry that TJ may have peaked and is doomed to decline in this more challenging ecology. This article is an attempt to show how the material and discursive environments of TJ have altered with the decline of the LIO and the rise of a multipolar world. In material terms, there are fewer democratic transitions that might facilitate the type of state-level rule of law or rights-promoting impact associated with accountability, truth or reparation processes, while liberal peacebuilding is now far less premised on democratisation and human rights that post-conflict TJ processes built upon. In a world where authoritarian rejections of human rights and the rule of law meet widespread support and where a chastened liberal West resiles from effectively exporting or supporting norms like TJ, there is also a lowering of the argumentative burden for those who want to outright defy, water down or find workarounds for TJ.

How does the international security environment influence whether and how military regimes democratise? This paper argues that for militaries in power, sustained external threats facilitate democratisation by credibly assuring the armed forces of continuing influence after leaving office. The credibility of this assurance stems from the military’s monopoly on the provision of national security and the reliance of all parties on the armed forces for the country’s defence. Militaries, confident of their continued influence after returning to the barracks, are more likely to cede power to democratisers when facing prolonged threats from abroad. Utilising a comparative case study of ruling militaries in Burma and South Korea, this paper tests four implications of the theory for how crises over democracy unfold between governing militaries and the opposition in contrasting security environments. It finds support for each of the implications.

Compulsory voting (CV) has been common in Latin America. While research on its effects is burgeoning, little is known about its origins. This article seeks to start filling the gap by focusing on the adoption of CV in democratising polities. It proposes an explanation that rests on two implications of what this institution can reasonably be expected to do, i.e. increase turnout. The first logic suggests that CV was established to curb electoral malfeasance. The second, in turn, posits that it was introduced for damage limitation to those who held power. These hypotheses are tested against alternatives through a comparative historical study of three South American countries.