Crises and regime instability: autocratization and democratization pathways across political regimes

Abstract

Abstract To what extent are political regimes vulnerable to crises? Established research has explored in depth how crises can compromise regime stability, from Linz's foundational studies to contemporary investigations. Yet, such contributions remain scattered across unconnected concepts, methods, and applications, thus hindering cumulative knowledge. This article crafts a coherent examination of different crises and their impacts on regime instability, with a twofold contribution: first, it synthesizes the findings of such a large literature; second, it advances them through a single framework and an extensive empirical test of their external validity. Applying various indicators of economic, violent, and disaster-related crises, our global study implements a broad range of time-series cross-sectional regression models on direct and moderated effects on different types of regime instability (alteration in democracy levels, democratic upturns/downturns, democratization/autocratization episodes, and democratic breakdown/transition) in democracies and autocracies. The findings not only confirm but also unveil multiple crises-related pathways of regime change, especially for economic and violent crises, and a generally greater fragility of autocracies compared to democracies, both in the face of the impact of a single crisis and in the occurrence of simultaneous crises. This reassessment bridges previous examinations, offers important policy suggestions, and opens up ways for further inquiries.