Democratization Theory Meets Policy

Paper for presentation at the ISA Annual Convention 2010 “Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners” Conference 17-20 Feb, 2010 in New Orleans, LA in the panel “Democracy: Theory and Policy.”Democracy promotion has been a mainstay in the toolbox of US foreign policy over the past 30 years. The rationale for democracy promotion is largely designed to turn autocracies into democracies based on the belief that “Democracies create free markets that offer economic opportunity, make for more reliable trading partners, and are far less likely to wage war on one another.”1 However, countries with only limited democratic processes are actually more prone intrastate and interstate violence.2 Therefore, pushing a country from autocracy to an autocracy with elections or a partial democracy may inadvertently cause a greater security problem. In order to avoid the unplanned creation of such hybrid regimes, a greater understanding of the factors that affect levels of democracy is required. This paper is a quantitative exploration of the effect of structural factors upon the level of democracy. While the interaction of key actors (e.g. civil society, the military, and the ruling executive) may be the final arbiters in determining a country’s level of democracy, the political preferences of those actors are influenced by structural factors. From the literature, the structural factors with the most explanatory power upon both democracy and actor preferences include security, economic development, and the diffusion of norms