Development and decline of democracies: the role of institutional factors

In this chapter we review literatures on how different institutional factors contribute to democratization or to democratic decline. We identify how institutions fit into four broad theories of what influences regime change and, in our subsequent discussions of specific literatures, we separate between institutional factors that are relevant to both democratization and democratic decline and those that are mainly relevant to one type of change. We, for example, discuss the literatures on state capacity and autocratization, authoritarian regime types or elections and democratization, and presidentialism and democratic decline. While some literatures point to clear institutional correlates of democratization or democratic decline, other literatures are replete with null results. Regardless, we discuss how issues of conceptual overlap and causal identification makes it relatively hard to conclude forcefully on these types of relationships. Still, we end by discussing recent results indicating that (mutually reinforcing) clusters of (quite different) institutions may help spur democratization and avert democratic decline.