Pursuing Democracy: Explaining Political Transitions in Nepal

Nepal has been struggling to consolidate a democratic political system for more than a half-century yet still does not have a working constitution. This paper is the first step in a larger research project examining regime transitions in Nepal. We review the existent comparative literature on democratization and authoritarian reversals in order to isolate some potential explanatory variables. We also focus on making valid descriptive inferences along these conceptual lines. What caused the failure of democracy in Nepal in the past? What are the future prospects for democratic consolidation? The literature has been divided along two lines, which we label as the Weberian and Neo-Marxist research programs. The former focuses on modernization and institutionalization, while the latter emphasizes class structure. We propose a multi-method research design, combining qualitative comparative analysis of most-similar cases with a longitudinal study of Nepal