Does Democratization Foster State Consolidation? Democratic Rule

Does Democratization Foster State Consolidation?
Democratic Rule, Political Order, and
Administrative Capacity
GIOVANNI CARBONE* and VINCENZO MEMOLI**
The established view in political science is that a sound and functioning state has to be
in place before democracy can be introduced. State first, and then democracy. While
acknowledging the existence of a basic state infrastructure as a necessary starting point,
we examine the possibility that democratization itself may play an important role in
the subsequent development and consolidation of the state. We do this by addressing the
major conceptual and methodological shortcomings of existing research on this topic. The
results of our panel analysis, covering a population of 122 countries, show that both a
country’s level of democracy and the interaction between degree and duration of democracy positively and significantly affect the consolidation of the state and of its two key
individual dimensions, namely, political order and administrative capacity.
Introduction: Democratization and the State
Over at least the past two decades, democratization and state-building processes have
been hotly debated issues in the international development agenda. Both, for example,
have been claimed to significantly affect such crucial issues as security, economic
growth or welfare (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2002; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002;
Evans and Rauch 1999; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Gerring et al. 2005; World Bank 1997).
Moreover, the two are often evoked together, as most evidently in the cases of
Afghanistan and Iraq after the U.S. interventions of 2001 and 2003. In an ideal statebuilding-cum-democratization trajectory, a state is established that is fully effective and
such a state is held accountable to its people, rather than its rulers. Yet, are democratic
politics and state consolidation actually related? And, in particular, does democratizing
a country’s political regime help strengthening its broader state apparatus? The question of whether introducing democracy can sustain a process of state strengthening has
crucial implications for countries as diverse as Haiti and Chad, Burma and Yemen,
Sudan and Papua New Guinea.
The subject itself is at the crossroad of two strands of political science literature that
have recently gained increased attention. The first one looks at the side effects of
democratization, that is, at its impact on a number of social, economic, and political
phenomena (e.g., Brown and Mobarak 2009; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2002; Carbone
2009; Gerring et al. 2005; Keefer and Khemani 2005; Lake and Baum 2001; Mulligan,
Gil, and Sala-i-Martin 2004). The second literature of concern consists of emerging
attempts at empirically measuring the notions of state, stateness, or state capacity
(Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell 2010; Evans and Rauch 1999; Fortin 2010; Hendrix
2010; Mata and Ziaja 2009).
*Università degli Studi di Milano
**Università degli Studi di Catania
Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions, Vol. 28, No. 1,
January 2015 (pp. 5–24).
© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
doi:10.1111/gove.12056
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GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we begin to discuss the
possible connection between democratization and state consolidation and we identify
the key components of a multidimensional notion of state. We then examine the causal
mechanisms potentially at play from a theoretical perspective, propose our specific
operationalization for both state and democracy, and spell out the hypotheses that
drive our empirical investigation. A panel analysis is then conducted and its results
discussed. Our findings show that democracy—in particular, a country’s degree of
democracy as well as the latter’s interaction with the duration of the democratic
regime—is indeed a relevant variable that helps explain state-building processes.
Does Democratization Help State Consolidation?
Modern democracy emerged in the West as a new political dispensation for what were
essentially already existing states. Similarly, comparatively well-functioning state apparatuses constituted a good basis for building democratic institutions in a number of
more recent transition cases, including the Czech, Slovak, and Polish republics, as well
as Chile, South Korea, or South Africa. Thus, the claim that democracy enhances the
consolidation of state institutions immediately raises the sensible objection that democracy can only exist after a state is already in place. Stateness is nothing less than a
necessary condition for democracy (cf. Linz and Stepan 1996, 14). In present-day
Somalia, for example, talking about democracy would largely amount to putting the
cart before the horse. Here, the primary issue cannot but be how to build or rebuild
state institutions, at least in an embryonic form. Few would actually question that states
are the essential underlying frameworks upon which contemporary democracies can
be built. This is also the reason why notions of democracy do not normally include the
state as a defining element: They presume the existence of a necessary minimum of
stateness.
Yet state-building is a continuous process. While a minimal functional capacity of
the state has to be in place before a country democratizes, Thomas Carothers stresses
that postponing democratization until a well-functioning state (i.e., “one with capable,
impartial institutions and a solid capacity to develop, legislate, and implement effective policies”) has been established wrongly assumes that autocrats will be good at the
job. Some authoritarian regimes did prove capable of creating significant levels of state
capacity, particularly in high-income countries such as Singapore or middle-income
ones such as Morocco or Jordan (Charron and Lapuente 2011). Yet, Carothers argues,
most dictators are inherently unsuited to contribute to the second stage of statebuilding—notably to the construction of an effective state bureaucracy—because an
impartial, efficient, effective, autonomous and legitimate state threatens the very nature
and survival of their rule (2007, 18–19). This was arguably the case in Gaddafi’s Libya,
Mobutu’s Zaire, or the Duvaliers’ Haiti. Framed in this manner, the question then
becomes: Is it the case that a state has to be effectively consolidated before it can be
democratized, or is it rather the very introduction of democratic processes and electoral legitimacy for public institutions that helps strengthening certain all-too-frail
states?
Before we examine in some more depth how exactly democracy may affect statebuilding trajectories, we need to look at the meaning and content of the otherwise
semiabstract notion of state.
How the state—and thus, as frequently used in the literature, “stateness,” “state
strength/fragility” and “state capacity”—should be defined and measured is a thorny
and long-debated issue. A huge amount of scholarly work, in particular, has been
produced around the issue of what constitutes a state, with modern reflections
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
7
fundamentally shaped by Max Weber’s thinking. Without fully entering the theoretical
debate on the state, we can identify certain key components of stateness that are
recurrent in empirical studies of the state. These components are political order, basic
administration, and legitimate authority (cf., e.g., Bratton 2004, 3; Mata and Ziaja 2009,
6). But what does each of these three dimensions amount to?
First, a state is in place to the (maybe limited) extent that it establishes a degree of
internal political order through a monopolistic control over the means of coercion. This
requires an infrastructure for the projection of state authority over the national territory, defining the scope of the reach of the state. There must be no significant alternative centers of political power, such as armed rebel movements and warlords or
traditional and religious establishments, that challenge a state’s central authority.
The second constitutive dimension concerns the presence of a basic administration,
or a “usable bureaucracy” (Linz and Stepan 1996, 11). This refers to the capacity of state
agencies in terms of functioning government structures and public service provision.
Such capacity, in turn, encompasses both the question of the material basis of the state
apparatus and that of the actual working of its administrative organizations. Any state,
regardless of how it is structured, requires material resources and thus revenue generation to function. Yet effectiveness is not only a matter of resources, since good
administration also hinges on the extent of respect for rules and procedures in public
bureaucracies, as opposed to bending them for private and corrupt uses of public
resources and institutions.
The third frequently mentioned element of a state is the legitimacy of public authority. State capacity is often assumed to require a degree of legitimacy and trust in state
institutions, as the latter’s effective action is best supported by some sort of quasivoluntary compliance on the part of the populace upon which policies are imposed. Of
course, besides regime type, political legitimacy is likely to depend on additional
factors, and in particular on the very quality of administration on the output side of the
political system (cf. Gilley 2009; Rothstein 2011, 31, 91 for a more radical view).
Examining this issue, however, is beyond the scope of our article.
According to the above threefold notion of stateness, a state gradually “consolidates” as it establishes a more complete territorial presence, overcoming possible
resistances to its order; as it develops sufficient administrative resources and a reasonable capacity to implement public policy; and as its authority and agencies are
deemed legitimate by the country’s populace and its politically significant groups.
Why and How Would Democracy Foster State-Building?
The Mechanisms at Work
What is the story, if any, connecting democratization to state consolidation? The topic
has been implicitly addressed by the literature on democratic reforms and civil conflicts: Because they signal the absence of political order, conflicts imply a loss of state
capacity. Empirical findings, however, are mixed. A number of works claim support
for the idea that democratic regimes promote domestic peace better than authoritarian
systems do (Elbadawi and Sambanis 2002; Glazer 2010, 19; Goldsmith 2010; Lacina
2006). Other scholars, however, either observe no relationship (Collier and Hoeffler
2004) or else stress that “domestic conflict is especially prevalent in semidemocracies”
(Ellingsen 2000, 243; Fearon and Laitin 2003, 84–85; Marshall and Gurr 2003, 17, 20).
Snyder and Ballentine (1996), Snyder (2000), and Chua (2003) produce evidence that
processes of democratization often contribute to fostering ethnic violence, especially in
the absence of effective states. Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia and Burundi are
cases in point (Mansfield and Snyder 2007). In trying to disentangle the impact of the
8
GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
degree of democracy (the anocracy hypothesis) from the effect due to political change
(the democratization hypothesis), Hegre et al. (2001) find evidence in support of a
U-shaped relationship whereby (stable and full) democracies have neither higher nor
lower risk of civil war than (stable and full) authoritarian states, but being a partial
and/or a young democracy significantly raises the probability of civil war. A key
problem with a number of studies such as Hegre et al. (2001) or Fearon and Laitin
(2003), however, is highlighted by Vreeland (2008, 414) who demonstrates that the
variables they adopt imply an element of endogeneity. Once the latter is addressed, the
“anocracy hypothesis” no longer appears to hold.
Only a handful of scholars have elaborated specific theories and causal mechanisms
to account for a possible impact of democratization on the state and empirically
examined the issue.
The existence of a connection between democratic reforms and state consolidation is
explored by Hanna Bäck and Axel Hadenius (2008) through their theory of “two
methods of steering and control.” Any perspective on the state has at its heart the
notion of a significant centralization of public activities, which, in turn, implies a
certain capacity for “steering and control” from the center. Yet, effective administrative
capacity is substantially advanced only when social groups and individuals that are
affected by state policies cooperate “from below.” While administrative capacity may at
first decline as processes of political opening are initiated and multi-actor politics
weakens controls from above, more full and stabilized democratic regimes can build
on bottom-up mechanisms and achieve the highest levels of administrative capacity.
Bäck and Hadenius find empirical support for the J-shaped relationship between
degree of democratization and administrative capacity that they hypothesized.
This otherwise important study, however, suffers from two significant limitations.
The first is the authors’ reliance on a notion of state capacity that boils down to the
latter’s administrative component only (operationalized through “bureaucracy
quality” and “control of corruption”). This leaves us wondering whether, in spite of its
positive impact on the functioning of administrative structures, democratic politics
may in fact generate a net negative effect on the state as a whole by also fostering
domestic conflicts and thus a gradual deterioration of political order, as a number of
authors suggest. The second weakness concerns the time dimension of the relationship.
Bäck and Hadenius claim that their findings point to “the presence of a dynamic
effect” (2008, 2), whereby democratization “at first” brings about a decline of state
capacity that is only compensated with further democratic progress. While this is both
plausible and in line with their theoretical argument, however, their empirical analysis
actually only employs measures of a country’s level of democracy at any given point in
time, thus failing to account directly for the impact on state capacity of the duration of
democracy.
In a related work, Nicholas Charron and Victor Lapuente (2010, 445) do include a
“democratic experience” indicator, but they employ the same dependent variable as
Bäck and Hadenius (2008); that is, they too remain strictly focused on the administrative aspects of the state. Their main point, however, is different. They find that the effect
of democracy is positive in rich countries but negative in poor countries. Robert Bates
similarly finds that “electoral competition and state failure go together” (2008, 12) in
his analysis of African regimes that embraced multiparty politics in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. By making incumbents less secure about their tenure and shortening their
time horizons, democratization raises the rewards from predation, fostering conflict
and state collapse. Political reforms, in other words, provoke disorder (Bates 2008,
26,108ff.). Work by Devra Moehler and Staffan Lindberg (2009), however, shows
that electoral alternation in government can have a significant effect on the popular
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
9
legitimation of state institutions—particularly in terms of “institutional trust” and
“consent to authority”—which is arguably a key step toward the effectiveness and
consolidation of state authorities.
An entirely different perspective on the relationship between democratization and
state development is offered by Dan Slater (2008). In this view, competitive elections
(something the author holds distinct from truly democratic elections) enhance state
infrastructural power through three main mechanisms. First, as illustrated by the
Malaysian case, they incite the creation of mass political parties. Parties, in turn,
maximize the pressure on elected governments to improve their institutional capacity
and deliver ever more challenging and universalistic policies. Second, the voter registration processes that are needed to hold elections make a population “legible” to the
state, thus generating “a basic foundation of state infrastructural power” and a key
starting point for the development of state policies, as shown by Indonesia. Finally,
because elections require state authorities to assert their presence all over the national
territory, a powerful effort will be made to establish an electoral administration and
conquer peripheral or recalcitrant regions to the state. Thus, as exemplified by the
Philippines, the electoral process can prove “a tool for the creation of political order”
(Wantchekon 2004, 18, in Slater 2008, 272).
Beside specific theories, a number of broader causal mechanisms that supposedly
link the introduction of democratic institutions and politics to the consolidation of the
state can be derived from a scant literature that largely failed to put them to the test.
These are in fact comprehensive performance-enhancing processes that, at least in
theory, can be expected to affect the performance, efficiency, and delivery of a state at
large, for example, by favoring the promotion and achievement of economic growth,
domestic peace, social well-being, and so on (cf. Brown and Mobarak 2009; Bueno de
Mesquita et al. 2002; Lake and Baum 2001; Siegle, Weinstein, and Halperin 2004). These
same processes are also likely to have an impact on the state, as explained below.
a) Democratic inclusion, legitimacy and effectiveness
Democratic participation is quasi-synonymous for social and political inclusion.
Through the expansion of the right to vote and other crucial freedoms such as the
freedom of expression, association, or assembly, all of a country’s citizens supposedly
become part, on an equal footing, of a political system from which many of them were
previously excluded. On the one hand, expressive participation implies that the very
opportunity of voicing their interests—through elections, parties, unions, civic organizations, social movements, and the like—allows individuals and groups to feel that
they are now taking part and have a stake in the system. Rather than feeling politically
excluded, people more likely identify with the state and accept the legitimacy of its
authority. This happened, for example, with the Turkish minority in Bulgaria and with
ethnic Albanians in Macedonia (Engström 2009). Elections, in particular, are meant to
be a tool for the legitimization of political authorities, and in this sense the notion that
“democracy legitimizes the state” (Bratton and Chang 2006, 1081) sounds like selfevident. At the same time, the instrumental side of participation implies that interests
are articulated and voiced by citizens and intermediary actors and are somehow taken
up by electorally accountable decision makers. Social needs and interests are thus
included in the decision-making process and, as a result, elected governments take
decisions that are more in line with public preferences. This way of making decisions
will improve the acceptance of state authority, breeding compliance. Compliance, in
turn, helps augmenting state effectiveness. Both expressive and instrumental participation are thus likely to reduce individual, local, or communal resistances to the social
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GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
and territorial penetration of state structures, facilitating the establishment and
enforcement of domestic political order throughout a national territory.
b) Political competition, accountability, and performance
Democratic competition also plays a crucial role in supporting a state consolidation
process. Competition implies the presence of one or more alternatives to current
rulers—that is, a government in waiting—and thus creates incentives for reelectionseeking politicians to improve their record in terms of investments in and provision of
public goods, rather than increase their rents or those of a few clients. They will thus
help improve state performance. In a system in which rulers face contestants, and thus
cannot credibly promise that they will be in power tomorrow to protect the interests of
rent seekers, the latter will be less ready to bribe politicians, resulting in lower levels
of corruption (Montinola and Jackman 2002, 151). In new democracies such as Estonia
and Slovenia, for instance, alternation in government helped reduce corruption and
foster the rule of law (cf. Horowitz, Hoff, and Milanovic 2009, 120). Alongside elections, more broadly, the accountability and monitoring mechanisms at the basis of the
working of parliaments, parties, the media, and civic associations constitute a persistent push for enhancing state performance (cf. Carothers 2007; Sen 1994). They create
a public sphere where public issues are raised, articulated, and debated, exposing
maladministration and corrupt behaviors and putting pressure on elected governments to improve the functioning of the state apparatus. Finally, the actual occurrence
of alternation in power broadens the number of citizens who, at least at one point in
time, identify with those in government and thus tends to further increase the legitimacy of state institutions, fostering the reach and the strength of state administrative
capacity.
c) Electoral processes and institution-building
While the above-mentioned democratic participation and competition processes supposedly improve a country’s performance at large—while also specifically affecting the
amelioration of the state—certain other aspects of democracy involve more specific
effects on stateness. The process of carrying out elections, in particular, is bound to
promote an expanded and deepened presence of the state over the national territory, as
proved in the cases of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines (Slater 2008). Holding
nationwide elections implies a need to establish, all over a country, election administrative bodies capable to conduct the registration of voters, the actual balloting, the
counting and reporting of votes, and so on. Areas of a country in which the presence
of the state was hardly felt before now need to be covered by these activities and the
related, necessary structures. When this requires affirming the sovereignty of the
central state over traditionally recalcitrant regions, ways of doing this must be found.
The result is thus an improved administrative capacity and power over the territory, a
capacity that can later be redirected toward other administrative tasks.
Underlying the above three sets of arguments—relating to democratic inclusion,
accountability, and institutional development—is the assumption that there are two
distinct ways in which democratic politics unfolds its full potential. One is when a
country displays the highest degrees of democracy. The second is through over time
democratic endurance and experience. Of course, in practice the two are likely to show
a certain overlap. But they need not, and thus, as we shall see, these processes must be
accounted for both separately as well as conjointly.
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
11
Hypotheses
From the above discussion, we derive five main hypotheses. Our starting proposition
is that more democratic countries develop stronger and more effective states than
authoritarian regimes do (Hypothesis 1). However, we also consider the possibility of
a nonlinear relationship between the degree of democracy and the strength of the state
(Hypothesis 2). It may in fact be hybrid regimes—that is, regimes whose institutions
and politics are less consistent than those of more fully democratic or fully authoritarian countries—that are associated with the weakest territorial sovereignty and
administrative effectiveness. Accordingly, a J-shaped curve may better capture the
relationship. Thus, the following are our baseline hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The more democratic a country, the stronger the state.
Hypothesis 2: Full democracies have stronger states than nondemocratic regimes, but nondemocratic
regimes have stronger states than regimes with intermediate levels of democracy.
We also consider time to be a potentially crucial factor. To account for the possibility
that democracy takes time to mature and affect the consolidation of a state, we include
a “duration of democracy” variable, that is, the duration of the existing democratic
regime. Hypothesis 3 is based on the idea of a linear relationship. Yet the introduction
of democracy may initially bring about what is actually a period of political fluidity,
instability, and uncertainty. If this is the case, countries may develop more robust states
only after they move beyond the transition years and gradually allow their new
pluralist institutions and open politics to gain roots and improve the way they function. The relationship may thus once again prove to be curvilinear, as in our fourth
hypothesis.
Hypothesis 3: The longer a country has been continuously democratic, the stronger the state.
Hypothesis 4: Countries that have been democratic for a significant and continuous period have
stronger states than nondemocratized/authoritarian regimes, but nondemocratized/authoritarian
regimes have stronger states than newly democratized regimes.
We also hypothesize that the effects of the degree and duration of democracy may
depend upon each other: Democratization may produce an impact on state consolidation only when both a certain level of democracy and a certain time under democracy
are attained.
Hypothesis 5: The impact of a country’s degree of democracy on state consolidation increases
gradually with the amount of time elapsed since its democratic transition.
Finally, we introduce a number of standard control variables. Besides the advent of
democracy, other factors are likely to play a role in a more complete explanation of state
consolidation processes. Above all, a country’s level of development is likely to be part
of the picture and we thus need to control for this. We also need to account for the fact
that state-building can be a particularly difficult task in large or ethnically fractionalized countries. We therefore decide to control for these aspects through a land area
variable and an ethnic fractionalization variable.
Operationalization
The State
Scholars find it somewhat easier to agree on what are the key dimensions of the state,
when defined in general terms as above, than on the question of how to operationalize
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GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
such dimensions. Among dozens empirical measures, two distinct approaches stand
out, namely, the use of single indicators (such as tax revenue, military spending, or per
capita income, for example; cf. Hendrix 2010) or the preference for composite indexes
(for a review, see Mata and Ziaja 2009). Each of the two approaches has its pros and
cons. Ultimately, however, no existing measure is satisfactory for the purpose of
examining the democratization/state-building relationship. Single proxy indicators
renounce the possibility of grasping the multidimensional character of the state. Existing state fragility indexes, on the other hand, tend to contain too wide a range of
indicators, with the result that several of them in fact “include . . . possible causes (such
as the lack of democracy) and predicated consequences (such as humanitarian disasters)” (Gutiérrez 2010, 24) of state capacity.
The solution is to be found somewhere in between the two extremes represented by
single proxies and multiple-indicator indexes. Bäck and Hadenius (2008) and Charron
and Lapuente (2010), for example, make a noteworthy effort in employing diverse but
limited indicators. Yet, as we already mentioned, by restricting their notion of state to
“administrative capacity” they entirely fail to account for the critical political order
dimension of the state.
A proper operationalization of the notion of state has to start from the two key
dimensions that are irrefutably at the heart of any notion of stateness, devise a parsimonious number of indicators for each of them, and combine them into a single
measure. We thus begin from the idea of state capacity as “infrastructural power”
articulated by Michael Mann within the Weberian tradition, that is, “the institutional
capacity of a central state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically
implement decisions” (Mann 1993, 59). As Fortin (2010, 656) observes, “at the core” of
Mann’s notion of infrastructural power is “the question of the state’s authority over
territory,” as well as “whether governments can implement policies, including the
provision of public goods.” To account for both aspects, we extrapolate two distinct
indicators from the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) and notably from its
“stateness” criterion or the degree to which “there is clarity about the nation’s existence as a state with adequately established and differentiated power structures” (cf.
BTI Manual 2010, 16). The first indicator concerns political order (“To what extent does
the state’s monopoly on the use of force cover the entire territory?”), whereas the
second has to do with administrative capacity (“To what extent do basic administrative
structures exist?”). They are both based on expert surveys and assign countries scores
ranging from 1 (lowest level) to 10 (highest level). Since we assume that both political
order and administrative capacity are essential to a functioning state, we aggregate our
two indicators by multiplying them. We also examine the effects of aggregating the two
indicators in an additive index.1
By combining a measure of political order with one of administrative capacity (and
thus accounting for the multidimensionality of the underlying concept), while at the
same time avoiding the conflation of our measure (and thus correcting the main flaw
of most state indexes), we crucially move a conceptual and empirical step further than
existing works. We purposely left out the above-mentioned third dimension that is
typically found in definitions of state, namely, legitimacy. The latter, in our view, is
often crucial to the functioning of a state, but less as a defining characteristic than as an
instrument that favors the successful establishment and working of a state apparatus
over the land and the people that a national government seeks to rule. As Levi points
out, that “of legitimacy and general support acceptance” remains an open question:
“some states have these characteristics and some states do not” (Levi 2002, 40). The
questioned legitimacy of Beijing’s or Bogotà’s presence in Tibetan and guerrilla territories, for example, does not per se make the Chinese nor the Colombian state any less
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
13
FIGURE 1
Monopoly of Force and Basic Administration in 124 Countries
Uruguay
10.00
y = 0.8201x + 0.5606
R² = 0.6717
9.00
8.00
Basic administraon
Kosovo 10
Eritrea 06
Zimbabwe 06
7.00
6.00
5.00
4.00
Georgia 10
Côte d'Ivoire 06
3.00
Afghanistan 06
Iraq 10
2.00
Guinea 10
Syria 08
Sudan 10
1.00
Somalia 10
0.00
0.00
1.00
Chad 08
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
6.00
7.00
8.00
9.00
10.00
Monopoly on the use of force
Source: Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2006, 2008, 2010.
real, except to the extent that it turns into a practical obstacle for the effectiveness of
government authorities in those areas.
Figure 1 is based on observations for 124 developing and emerging countries for the
years 2006, 2008, and 2010. The figure shows that the two indicators we assume to
capture key components of the concept of state are indeed strongly associated
(r = 0.82): unchallenged domination over the means of coercion largely goes hand in
hand with a firm administrative presence. We included the names of a few countries to
illustrate where they stood at a given point in time. At one extreme, for example, we
find countries such as Uruguay, rated in all three years as having full control over its
national territory and a sound basic administration. At the opposite end,
unsurprisingly, Somalia 2006 to 2010 and Iraq 2010 received the lowest possible scores
on both dimensions, namely, 1 for monopoly of force and 1 for basic administration. It
is only in about 10% of all country-years that the “distance” between the two indicators
measures more than two points, suggesting situations of uneven state development.
Democracy
When operationalizing democracy for studying the consequences of democratization,
a reasonable caveat is that minimalist notions and measures of democracy are likely to
be more appropriate than more substantive notions (cf. Carbone 2009; Soifer and vom
Hau 2008, 225). This is because, in order to learn something about the effects of
democracy on a given object of study—in this case, the state—without incurring in
endogeneity problems, one needs to be sure that the chosen definition of the independent variable does not include nor measures elements that are also part of the dependent variable. It has been convincingly argued, for example, that the Polity index
should only be used in conflict explanations after “cleaning” it from components that
refer to political violence and civil war (Vreeland 2008, 414). Similarly, definitions of
democracy often include a “government effectiveness” component. This can be problematic since it implies mixing up attributes of political authority and regime qualities
that we want to disentangle (Soifer and vom Hau 2008, 225).
In this article, we assess a country’s level of democracy through a new measure that
builds on Freedom House (FH) and the Polity IV data. From FH, we take the Political
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GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
Rights scale and then, to avoid endogeneity, we remove the component of this scale
that refers to corruption. We then rescale a country’s score on a 1–7 scale and reverse
the results so to have 1 as the worst (full autocracy) and 7 as the best score (full
democracy). Bäck and Hadenius (2008, 8) similarly opt for the Political Rights measure
(averaged with Polity IV scores). Since with the 2003 edition of the FH’s Freedom in the
World Survey—that is, the edition that covers the year 2002—the issue of corruption
had been moved from the “civil liberties” checklist to the “political rights” checklist
and the two authors examine the 1984–2002 period, however, it appears that they
actually include observations from one year (2002) for which corruption was measured
both by their dependent as well as by their independent variable.
From Polity IV, we take the Polity2 variable and follow Vreeland (2008, 406–407) in
dropping those components that relate to conflict (i.e., lack of political order) so to
avoid endogeneity problems. The resulting scale for our “clean” Polity variable runs
between −6 (full autocracy) and +7 (full democracy). Finally, we produce our new
measure through a factor analysis of the FH and Polity IV scores that we obtained from
the above-mentioned procedures. This variable ranges from the most negative score
(−3.63) for countries such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia to the most positive assessment
(+2.13) for the likes of Lithuania, Uruguay, South Africa, or Taiwan. Our sample
of country-year observations displays a fairly homogeneous distribution along this
continuum.
Besides the level of democracy, we calculate the amount of time a country has spent
under an existing democratic regime. This measure is based on our Polity2 “cleaned”
variable. For every year for which a country reaches a democratic threshold (i.e., ≥ 5 on
our −6 to +7 scale, equivalent to the ≥ 7 threshold of the −10 to +10 Polity2 index2), our
duration of democracy variable counts the number of years since the transition. This
indicator assumes a value of 0 for every year for which a country’s politics was deemed
undemocratic. We start counting the number of years a country spent under democratic rule from 1900, albeit in practice it is only a handful of cases (Costa Rica, India,
Colombia, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Mauritius) that boast an uninterrupted democratic
experience dating back to before the beginning of the “third wave” of democratization
in 1974.
Data, Methods, and Empirical Results
We use three years for which BTI disaggregated data are available (2006, 2008, 2010),
implying a limited time span of the analysis.3 The resulting sample consists of 122
countries and 344 country-year observations. Advanced economies, as well as a few
other countries, are not covered by the BTI surveys. This is consistent with our aim of
studying the impact of democracy upon state consolidation in the context of contemporary democratization processes.
To carry out our empirical analysis we apply a longitudinal regression model on a
short unbalanced panel data set, a data set in which the behavior of a large number of
countries is observed across time. Since the number of countries we examine (122) is
greater than the number of time points (three years), a random effects model is
expected to be more efficient than a fixed effects model, as it has N more degrees of
freedom and it also uses information from the between-unit estimator (which averages
the time-series observations of each unit to investigate differences across units). The
Hausman test confirms that the random effects model is appropriate. Finally, because
we found some heteroskedasticity, we employ robust standard errors.
We separately examine the effect of our explanatory variables on the two distinct
components of the state, namely, political order and administrative capacity, as well as
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
15
on two synthetic indexes, one based on an additive aggregation rule and one on a
multiplicative aggregation rule. The relationship between our democracy variables
(democracy level and duration of democracy) and the dependent variables is examined both in linear and in quadratic terms. The quadratic functions are meant to test the
idea that systems that are only partly democratized (level) or have only been recently
democratized (duration) may actually experience a decline in their stateness, while a
strengthening of the state will only become manifest under higher levels or longer
duration of democracy. Level and duration of democracy are also interacted with each
other. We lagged our independent variables in line with our expectation that they
precede state improvements. Since the relationship between democracy and stateness
raises questions concerning reciprocity, we also run a two-stage least squares regression that confirmed that our model does not present endogeneity problems.4
As Table 1 shows, we do find noteworthy results with respect to all four outcomes
of interest. First, the level of democracy contributes in a strong and significant manner
to explain all of our dependent variables, that is, single-state dimensions as well as
combined-state indexes. Second, while the duration of democracy bears no significance
as an autonomous factor, it does produce positive effects when interacted with the
degree of democracy. Third, both a country’s level of development and its size matter
for state consolidation, whereas ethnic diversity largely seems to play no role. Our
results hold when we eliminate entirely from the sample those countries for which we
lack information for one or more of the three years under scrutiny, obtaining a balanced panel.
A closer, analytical look at our results provides a more nuanced story. When we
focus on the individual components as dependent variables—that is, the monopoly on
the use of force (column 1) and basic administration (column 2)—we find that the
degree of democracy positively and significantly affects each of them. Democracy’s
effect appears to be curvilinear. As the analysis of marginal effects shows (see
Figures 2–8), however, in nondemocratic countries the effect is only significant for the
monopoly of force, not for basic administration. This effect, in particular, is negative:
The capacity of a state to fully monopolize coercion by avoiding or rooting out violent
challenges to its authority appears to decline if tough authoritarian regimes (the likes
of Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, or Eritrea, scoring between 0 and 1 on the 0–6 scale of
marginal effects) move from most harshly repressive to only slightly less repressive
political systems. For both domestic order and basic administration, no significant
effect emerges in regimes with very or relatively low levels of political opening (i.e.,
scores between 1 and 3, from countries like China and Angola to Algeria and Singapore). But when an intermediate or more substantial level of democracy is reached (3
or above, i.e., ranging from cases such as Thailand or Armenia to Brazil or Estonia), the
impact on a state’s ability to ensure political order and to establish a fundamental
bureaucratic presence on the ground becomes positive and significant.
As for the duration of democracy variable, on the other hand, our regression analysis suggests that it has no autonomous relevance, whether examined in linear or
quadratic terms. Crucially, however, the interaction between degree and duration of
democracy is significant with regard to political order: The more a country combines
both a substantial level and a certain length of democracy, the more this will favor the
process of monopolization of force.
The role of two out of our three control variables is also supported by empirical
evidence. Countries are more likely to successfully build states if they are more developed and smaller in size, as we anticipated. Ethnic diversity, on the contrary, has a more
ambiguous role: Heterogeneity is inimical to the amelioration of a country’s administrative structures, but it does not affect a state’s capacity to implement internal order.
1.413
0.675
0.814
0.415
125.41
0.000
344
122
0.195
0.167
0.021
0.000
0.0161
0.627
0.101
0.064
1.353
−0.466
0.635****
−0.169***
4.487***
Robust
St. Error
0.506***
0.549***
−0.034
−0.000
0.036**
B
(1) Monopoly on
the Use of Force
Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01; ****p < 0.001.
Democracy
Democracy2
Duration of democracy
Duration of democracy2
Democracy*duration of
democracy
Fractionalization ethnic
Log GDP per capita
Log area
Constant
Sigma_u
Sigma_e
Rho
R2
Wald chi-square (8)
Prob > chi-square
Number of observation
Number of groups
(country)
TABLE 1
Longitudinal Regression Model
1.179
0.633
0.776
0.599
230.66
0.000
344
122
−0.992*
0.818****
−0.151***
2.428*
0.708****
0.394**
−0.007
−0.000
0.006
B
0.568
0.104
0.058
1.285
0.182
0.185
0.013
0.000
0.011
Robust
St. Error
(2) Basic
Administration
2.406
1.080
0.832
0.544
187.86
0.000
344
122
−1.471
1.465****
−0.321***
6.851***
1.151***
0.890***
−0.033
−0.000
0.039*
B
1.117
0.187
0.112
2.434
0.334
0.289
0.033
0.001
0.020
Robust
St. Error
(3) Monopoly +
Basic Admin.
14.895
6.956
0.821
0.607
248.69
0.000
344
122
−9.248
9.819****
−2.455***
7.248
8.805****
6.838****
−0.330
−0.001
0.344**
B
6.818
1.139
0.768
15.002
2.224
1.857
0.210
0.003
0.139
Robust
St. Error
(4) Monopoly*
Basic Admin.
16
GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
17
FIGURE 2
Reference to Table 1, Column 1: Democracy Level*Democracy Level
2
0
-2
-4
Marginal impact of level of democracy
4
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
1
2
3
level of democracy
4
5
6
FIGURE 3
Reference to Table 1, Column 1: Democracy Level*Democracy Duration
6
4
2
0
Marginal impact of level of democracy
8
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
duration of democracy
80
90
100
110
We now turn to the two indexes that we built by combining both dimensions of the
state. Columns 3 and 4 differ in that while in the first one we combine our measures of
political order and basic administration through an additive logic, in the second one
we join them by multiplication.
As it can be seen, both models have a variance greater than 50.0%—as great as 60.7%
in the case of our multiplicative index—and the independent variables have the same
relationship with each of the two indexes, albeit with different intensity in terms
of effect. In both cases, the impact of the degree of democracy is curvilinear and
18
GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
FIGURE 4
Reference to Table 1, Column 2: Democracy Level*Democracy Level
2
1
0
-1
-2
Marginal impact of level of democracy
3
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
1
2
3
level of democracy
4
5
6
FIGURE 5
Reference to Table 1, Column 3: Democracy Level*Democracy Level
4
2
0
-2
-4
Marginal impact of level of democracy
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
1
2
3
level of democracy
4
5
6
significant. Estimates of the marginal effects show, however, that it is only from an
intermediate to high level on that democracy positively and significantly affects the
state-building process (see Figures 5 and 7). On the contrary, the effect is not significant
at low levels of democracy (scores between 1 and 3), whereas at extremely low levels
it is only significant, if negative, for the multiplicative index. As already emerged with
regard to the individual components of the state, the duration of democracy and
squared duration of democracy variables have no effects on the dependent variable.
Once again, however, democratic duration becomes a crucial factor when combined
with the degree of democracy: If democratic advances are genuine and lasting, they
also prove to have a positive bearing on state consolidation. Finally, in line with the
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
19
FIGURE 6
Reference to Table 1, Column 3: Democracy Level*Democracy Duration
8
6
4
2
0
Marginal impact of duration of democracy
10
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
duration of democracy
80
90
100
110
FIGURE 7
Reference to Table 1, Column 4: Democracy Level*Democracy Level
20
0
-20
-40
Marginal impact of level of democracy
40
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
1
2
3
4
level of democracy
5
6
previous models, larger and less developed countries are associated with weaker
states, while the ethnic fragmentation variable yields no significant impact.
The results we described also hold when we eliminate entirely from the sample
those countries for which we lack information for one or more of the three years under
scrutiny, obtaining a balanced panel.
Discussion
We hypothesized that democracy may generate beneficial effects for state-building
processes. In particular, we expected that countries whose political systems display a
20
GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
FIGURE 8
Reference to Table 1, Column 4: Democracy Level*Democracy Duration
60
40
20
0
Marginal impact of level of democracy
80
Predictive margins with 95% confidence interval
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
duration of democracy
80
90
100
110
higher degree of democracy may facilitate the construction of states with more complete control over the national territory and better operational structures. Besides the
level of democracy of a regime at a given moment, we also expected the amount of
time a country has spent under pluralist electoral politics—that is, the duration of its
democratic regime—to affect the completion of state consolidation processes. For both,
in addition, we aimed at testing the possible existence of a curvilinear relationship in
which the degree/duration of democracy would strengthen the state only when they
reach beyond a partial/early political liberalization, as the latter may actually contribute to weaken the state. Finally, democracy level and duration may just as well need
each other (a certain degree of political opening, a certain amount of time under open
politics) for democratization to produce the expected effects on state consolidation. We
also posited that state-building is likely to be affected by the size, the social heterogeneity, and the level of development of a country.
What can we infer from our analysis? Our findings show that the extent to which a
country’s political system is democratized is indeed a key variable in explaining
progress toward state consolidation. The degree of democracy separately affects each of
our two component measures, namely, a state’s monopoly on the use of force and the
effectiveness of its basic administrative framework. The impact of the level of democracy becomes even stronger when we combine the two measures in a single index of
stateness, either by addition or by multiplication. The relationship between level of
democracy and state consolidation, however, is curvilinear. Moreover, for the most,
such a relationship becomes significant when a country’s regime reaches a certain
degree of political opening, participation, and competition. It is only when democratic
progress is for real, in other words, that it starts contributing to the strengthening of a
country’s state.
While the degree of democracy variable is consistently positive and significant, our
duration of democracy variable is not so. Democratic duration, however, becomes a
relevant factor when combined with a country’s level of democracy. Democracies that
both are more accomplished and last longer do help achieving a more complete
monopoly in the use of force and, more generally, stronger states.
DOES DEMOCRATIZATION FOSTER STATE CONSOLIDATION?
21
Finally, the results of the analysis support the intuitive notion that state consolidation is also made easier at higher levels of economic development and in smaller
countries. More resources and a more limited land area over which to establish order
and administration make these tasks easier.
Conclusions
Democratization and state-building are key issues for many developing countries. The
existence of a state is normally—and rightly—considered a precondition for the establishment of democratic rule. Yet there are good reasons to believe that after a basic
infrastructure for the exercise of state power has been established, the very introduction of democratic politics may contribute to the further development and strengthening of the state. To an extent, in other words, things may work backward.
The issue of a possible impact of democratization upon state-building has hardly
been addressed in empirical research. No existing work, in particular, employs an apt
notion of state that encompasses the latter’s two essential dimensions, namely, political
order and administrative capacity. We thus set out to start filling this gap. We devised
a suitable measure of democracy (i.e., one that is cleaned of components referring to
the state’s own attributes) and an appropriate measure of stateness (i.e., one that
comprises both the aforementioned two features), and then built a data set covering a
panel of over 100 developing nations.
The empirical analysis we carried out supports our argument. More democratic
countries are more likely to develop stronger and more effective states. We had also
conjectured that more enduring democracies would be particularly likely to reap the
fruits of a better developed state, and we found that this is the case but only when
durability is combined with a certain degree of democracy. By pointing to the fact that
democratization and state-building may well support each other, rather than the latter
requiring to postpone the former, our findings have evident policy implications.
Authoritarian rulers do not make better “state consolidators” than democratically
elected leaders. Rather, it is the other way round.
Besides expanding the limited time frame of our analysis, what future investigations
need to further shed light on is how it is, in practice, that democratization can help
strengthen state consolidation. In our article, we suggested that there are three main
causal mechanisms at play, namely, inclusion/legitimation, competition, and electoral
processes. Examining how political inclusion helps legitimize state authorities and
make them more effective will require a focus on issues such as the degree and forms
of political participation or the extent of popular support for the democratic regime as
key intermediary variables. Alternatively, case studies may also help illuminate the
impact of democratic legitimation of state consolidation. In her account of South
Africa’s transition, for example, Carter (2011, 15) suggests that universal suffrage and
competitive elections (alongside the rule of law and security for individual freedoms)
crucially helped the country reverse a process of delegitimation of the state. The second
mechanism demands that attention is shifted to the competitive pressures placed upon
incumbent, democratically elected governments. Modeling an analysis of this issue
could be done by using variables and data on the size of opposition forces or on the
occurrence of alternation in power (cf. Moehler and Lindberg 2009). Finally, our third
mechanism has to do with the process of building electoral institutions and with the
spillover effects this process is likely to produce. Slater’s (2008) work on South-East
Asia has brilliantly shown how this linkages can be traced through a qualitative
approach. Large-N studies might be more difficult to carry out due to data availability.
Yet quantitative strategies should be explored that, for example, examine the
22
GIOVANNI CARBONE AND VINCENZO MEMOLI
connection between elections, voters’ registration, and subsequent legibility-related
policy implementation such as vaccination programs. We would expect all of the above
to confirm that the more fully and the longer a democratic regime has developed, the
more likely state institutions will benefit in terms of effectiveness and capacity.
Acknowledgments
This work is part of a research project on “The Economic, Social and Political Consequences of Democratic Reforms: A Quantitative and Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (COD), funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (Grant
Agreement no. 262873, “Ideas,” 7th Framework Programme of the EU).
Notes
1.
Bertelsmann’s “basic administration” measure is strongly correlated with most alternative
measures in the literature. Pearson’s correlation values (all significant at 0.01 level) are as
follows: Control of Corruption (World Governance Indicators) 0.719; Government Effectiveness (World Governance Indicators) 0.793; Rule of Law (World Governance Indicators)
0.782; Rule of Law (Bertelsmann Transformation Index) 0.645; Quality of Government
(QOG Institute, mean value of corruption, law and order, and bureaucracy quality variables from the International Country Risk Guide) 0.621; impartiality, professionalism, and
closedness of public administration (factor, QOG expert survey) 0.474. The latter’s more
moderate level of correlation, when compared to the other measures, might be due to the
much more limited number of cases covered by the QOG expert survey.
2. In the Polity IV users’ manual, Marshall, Gurr, and Jaggers (2010, 35) suggest that regimes
should be considered autocratic when they score −10 to 0, partly democratic with +1 to +6
scores, and fully democratic with +7 to +10 scores.
3. Disaggregated data are not available for 2003.
4. When we tested for the endogeneity of democracy (the null hypothesis being that it is
exogenous), the results—Robust score chi-square(1) = 0.067 (p = 0.796), Robust regression
F(1,340) = 0.068 (p = 0.795)—show that the hypothesis is not rejected. We thus cannot reject
exogeneity of democracy in the model.
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