A01027137
Joshua Soriano Fernandez
Book Review, Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change by Stephan
Haggard and Robert R Kaufman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 396pp, ISBN
9780691172156
Been the third book where Stephan Haggard and Robert Kauffman work together,
Dictators and Democrats is their joint work, after The Political Economy of Democrats
Transitions (1995) and Development, Democracy and Welfare States (2008); it is again
related to the link between development and political regimes. In it, they confront the two
theories of regime change with reality.
These two theories, by Daron Acemoglu, Carles Boix, and James Robinson, offer a set of
clearly identified predictions that are empirically testable, especially regarding the role of
inequalities. Two main trends theorize regime change. First, modernization theory sees
economic development as a prerequisite for democracy. More recently, regime change has
been modeled as a result of the strategic interaction of social groups (class conflict and
conflict within the elite).
In Dictators and Democrats, Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman test these predictions.
For this, they identify 78 democratizations and 25 returns to an autocratic regime between
1980 and 2008, and code them according to the characteristics of the initial regime, giving
to whether the conflict is distributive or intra-elite, and also to its development. Their work
combines panel analysis and systematic qualitative analysis. As a result, the two theories
are weakened at two points. First, a democratization episode only coincides with a
redistributive conflict in just over half of the cases. More worrying still, inequalities do not
play the expected role, neither in transition nor in democratic consolidation, nor are they
even limited to cases of redistributive conflicts.
