1 Authoritarianism as a Form of Sustained Low-Intensity Civil Conflict: Does Age Structure Provide Insights into the Democratic Transition?1

Abstract. Arguably, the most puzzling question pertaining to recent analyses of the democratic transition is: Why has there been a tendency for democratizing states to stall or retreat along the path to full democracy? We approach this question by assuming that authoritarianism is a form of low-intensity civil conflict perpetuated by states on non-state actors and state-faction rivals, and that full democracy is civil peace (a cessation of violence, coercion and intimidation). This assumption allows for adapting the “youth bulge model of the risk of civil conflict ” to investigate the democratic transition. To assess our “successive transitions model ” of progress to full democracy, we use polity scores from the Polity IV Dataset (Center for International Development an