I study regime legacies through the lens of comparative democratization, contentious politics, and public opinion, with an empirical focus on Latin America. The basic undercurrent of my research holds that over time democracy creates and empowers its own adversaries, whereas authoritarian regimes leave behind legacies that are conducive to the peaceful and democratic resolution of domestic political conflict. Below I present several components of my ongoing research.
Regime Legacies and the Adversaries of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America
Working Paper
In this working paper, I lay out and test the core tenets of my argument about regime legacies. First, by fostering the proliferation and empowerment of organized interests, a greater ‘stock’ of historically accumulated democratic experiences, which I refer to as the stock of democracy, augments the stakes and intensity of the competition for political power, which in turn radicalizes competing collective actors, understood as the adoption of an intransigent and impatient approach to political conflict. Together, these legacies of democracy expand the range of powerful adversaries of democracy. Second, by eliminating and weakening opposition groups, an extensive authoritarian history, which amounts to a greater stock of dictatorship, mitigates the competitive struggle for political power, thereby fostering moderation among the societal actors that survived its onslaught. These authoritarian legacies amount to the suppression of democracy’s adversaries, in that the polities that inherit them involve collective actors that are likely to be moderate (as opposed to radical) and few in number to begin with. I test these claims through an empirical focus upon 952 societal actors in twenty Latin American countries (1944-2010).
Regime Legacies, Military Coups and the Institutional Route to Dictatorship: Evidence from Latin America
Working Paper
In another study, I investigate the implications of my core argument about regime legacies for the electoral and parliamentary routes to dictatorship. I argue that by creating, strengthening and radicalizing political parties, and by expanding the pool of alienated yet mobilized voters, the stock of democracy spurs the proliferation and effectiveness of electoral campaigns of democracy’s adversaries. The implications of their electoral victories and representation in the executive and the legislature for the prospects of democratization take the form of (1) government-imposed restrictions on opposition political parties, and (2) the legislature’s abdication of its democratic obligation to uphold executive constraints. The stock of dictatorship exerts a democratizing effect in this respect. I investigate these implications using multiple global datasets (1900-2016), and explore the underlying mechanisms through a focus on Latin American governments, political parties, their electoral campaigns, and their institutional behavior (1944-2010).
This study also accounts for the recent decline in the relative appeal of military coups as a means to impose dictatorship. On the one hand, I argue that the (de)radicalizing legacies of democracy and dictatorship also apply to the military’s approach to political conflict. On the other hand, by determining the organizational resources of democracy’s adversaries, regime legacies also affect their capacity to successfully exploit its electoral and legislative institutions. By doing so, they also determine the relative appeal of costly military coups. I explore the implications of this argument for the occurrence of military coups around the world (1950-2010), and unpack the underlying mechanism through an empirical focus on military actors in Latin America (1944-2010).
Dissertation Research
In my dissertation, entitled “Regime Legacies and Domestic Peace: Evidence from Latin America”, I shift attention to political conflict that operates outside political institutions by investigating the implications of my argument within the realm of domestic political contention, and unpack the underlying mechanisms through an empirical focus on twenty Latin American countries. I contend that a greater stock of democracy fosters the outbreak of large-scale political violence, and that a greater stock of dictatorship yields pacific outcomes.
In order to test my theoretical claims, I conduct observational research that uncovers empirical associations at the level of countries, governments, resistance campaigns, societal actors and individual citizens, among others. I do so through a combination of quantitative methods, existing global and regional datasets, and the implementation of Indiana University’s homegrown principles that underlie the workflow for replicable data analysis.
Below you can access three dissertation chapters and one appendix. The first of these texts is theoretical, whereas the remaining three are mostly empirical. I describe each of these in more detail below, followed by the list of references. I also offer brief descriptions of related work in progress.
If you are interested in accessing additional materials from this research project, such as the remaining dissertation chapters, particular do-files (marked “wkastart-DR-[…].do” throughout the text) and/ or the corresponding datasets, please contact me through e-mail via wkastart [at] wynandkastart [dot] com. To find out more about my research, you can also access my CV.
The Pacific Legacies of Democracy and Dictatorship
Dissertation Chapter 1
This introductory chapter lays out my theory about regime legacies, as well as the implications for domestic political contention that flow from my core argument. My theory revolves around two sets of claims. First, the stock of democracy creates and empowers societal actors, such as political parties, labor unions and business associations, whereas the stock of dictatorship typically weakens and eliminates them. Second, whereas the stock of democracy radicalizes both societal actors and governments, the stock of dictatorship deradicalizes them.
These claims carry severe implications for domestic peace and the outbreak of large-scale political violence in particular. Most notably, by augmenting the organizational resources, coercive capacity and radicalism of non-state political actors, prior democratic experiences spur the emergence, lethality and mobilization of coercive mass movements of resistance, referred to as “political campaigns”. The causal impact of the stock of dictatorship mirrors these legacies. This chapter describes the mechanisms that drive these and other relationships in detail, and draws upon Latin American political history to illustrate them. It also discusses this study’s contributions to the existing research literature.
Regime Legacies and Domestic Peace: A Global Analysis
Dissertation Chapter 4
The scope of this chapter’s quantitative empirical analysis is global (involving all independent countries) and mostly encompasses the years 1945-2006. Its purpose is to test the implications of my theory about regime legacies as it pertains to domestic peace and the outbreak of large-scale political violence. Several aspects of domestic political contention revolving around mass movements of resistance – or “political campaigns” – serve as the empirical testing grounds to scrutinize these implications.
First, I estimate the effects of the stock of democracy and the stock of dictatorship upon the initiation of political campaigns. Second, I uncover the regime legacy effects upon their primary method of resistance, distinguishing between peaceful and violent alternatives. Third, I explore their effects upon the extent of popular involvement in political campaigns. Next, I draw attention to the repressive behavior of the governments that are facing these challenges against their rule. I do so by estimating the effects of the stock of democracy and the stock of dictatorship upon the scope of state repression during these episodes of contention, as well as the extent to which these governments incorporate violence in their repressive interventions against political campaigns.
The empirical results accord with the basic undercurrent of this study, in that historical experiences with democracy are sometimes a positive, but never a negative empirical correlate of the aspects of large-scale political violence that I investigate, whereas these aspects are sometimes negatively, but never positively associated with the stock of dictatorship. Yet these results also call for a number of modifications of my theoretical argument, which I discuss in this chapter as well.
Regime Legacies and Political Actors in Latin America
Dissertation Chapter 5
This chapter shifts the empirical focus to Latin America. It serves the purpose of testing the core tenets of my theory about regime legacies, and does so in light of the empirical findings and theoretical modifications discussed in the previous chapter. As such, it unpacks most of the mechanisms that drive my theory’s implications for the outbreak of large-scale political violence.
The quantitative empirical analysis revolves around governments and societal actors in twenty Latin American countries (1944-2010). First, I estimate the effects of the stock of democracy and the stock of dictatorship upon the proliferation and strength of societal actors. Next, I investigate the regime legacy effects upon their degree of radicalism, and explore whether these effects are driven by the proposed mechanisms. I also do so with respect to the radicalism of governments. I leverage the incorporation into the empirical analysis of additional measures of the regime stock variables by exploring how ‘mild’ or ‘intense’ democratic and authoritarian experiences should be in order to yield particular legacy effects, and qualify my theory accordingly. With these qualifications in mind, I draw several substantive conclusions that are generally supportive of my core argument.
First, I find that the stock of democracy empowers societal actors, whereas the recently accumulated stock of dictatorship eliminates them. Furthermore, by elevating the stakes and intensity of the competition for political power, exposing societal actors to these heightened levels of political competition in a sustained fashion, and eroding their normative commitment to democracy, prior democratic experiences radicalize their approach to political conflict. Also, by narrowing the field of powerful political organizations, the stock of the most severe instances of dictatorship deradicalizes them. Finally, the stock of the most expansive forms of democracy radicalizes governments by weakening their democratic norms.
Measuring Democracy and State Repression
Dissertation Appendix A
In this measurement appendix, I present the contributions of my dissertation research that come in the form of descriptive inferences about the political regime type and state repression. I use latent class analysis and multiple global and Latin America-specific datasets to conduct the analysis, which explores empirical patterns that operate at the level of country-years (1900-2016). Its purpose is twofold. First, for each of the two concepts of interest, it carries out the task of determining whether the proposed dimensions and relationships between them are empirically distinguishable. Second, it develops novel measures of the political regime type and state repression that capture interpretable and identifiable dimensions. To the extent that these dimensions and the relationships between them overlap with the ones that I proposed, the validity of these measures is enhanced; to the extent that they do not, I modify my concepts accordingly.
The results call for two inferential conclusions. First, for the political regime type, the proposed conceptual multidimensionality, involving a collinearity between (1) the competitiveness of elections, and (2) the extent of executive constraints, is distinguishable, yet primarily in terms of the ‘speed’ at which observations `move’ along these two dimensions. That is, country-years are always more democratic with respect to competitive elections than with respect to executive constraints, but any move towards or away from democracy along one dimension involves a simultaneous move along the other dimension in the same direction. The important implication is that intermediate levels of democracy take the form of electoral authoritarian regimes (encompassing competitive authoritarian regimes and hegemonic party regimes). Second, whereas I proposed two independent dimensions of state repression, distinguishing between (1) its scope and (2) its pacification (i.e., the incorporation of state violence), only the first of these is identifiable.
List of References
Other Work in Progress
The implications of my core argument extend beyond the empirical testing grounds that I explore in the texts presented above, and structure my current research plans. Below I briefly describe one additional study under development that forms part of this research agenda.
Regime Legacies and Political Efficacy in Latin America
In the remaining empirical dissertation chapter, I investigate the individual-level implications of my theory, which revolve around perceptions of political empowerment that spur popular involvement in politics and political campaigns in particular. I argue that the stock of democracy exerts a mobilizing effect in this respect, whereas the stock of dictatorship shapes efficacious attitudes in ways that depress political participation. I draw upon public opinion survey data from Latin America to test my claims.