Expected stability: defining and measuring democratic consolidation

"The paper starts with a probabilistic definition of democratic consolidation. A democratic regime is consolidated, it claims, when it has acquired a high probability of survival. The article discusses some implications and complications of this definition: its probabilistic foundations and its continuous, cognitive, and subjective nature. This descriptive concept of democratic consolidation, the text argues in continuation, helps avoiding two common methodological pitfalls: etiological definitions (that fail to distinguish between defining features and causal variables) and operational definitions (that fail to distinguish between concepts and operational indicators). The essay concludes with some reflections on the observation and measurement of democratic consolidation. [author's abstract