The Sustainability of Democracy: The Experience of Latin America, 1945-1994

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9511509 Remmer By focusing upon the relationship between institutional arrangements and regime sustainability, this project is designed to bridge the gap separating older macrosocial understanding of political democracy from more contemporary work stressing indeterminacy, conjunctural conditions, and contingent choice. This study reevaluates the conventional wisdom concerning the dependence of democratic stability upon economic performance and test a theoretical alternative that takes into account the differential strengths and weaknesses of political democracy and authoritarianism as well as institutional variations among democratic regimes. The overarching conception is that institutions matter as contextual determinants of behavior mediating between systemic and structural forces, on the one hand, and individual political actors on the other. The project involves three major components. First the research entails the development and analysis of a data base on political institutions, electoral outcomes, and economic performance in Latin America for the period 1945-1994, which will be shared with other interested researchers. Second, the study elaborates and tests a set of cross-sectional regression models linking regime durability with three major sets of variables: international political context, domestic economic performance, and political institutions. The models will address outstanding questions regarding the relative fragility of authoritarian and democratic political orders and establish a basis for estimating the relative contribution of economic and institutional forces to the sustainability of political democracy. Third, the research utilizes survival analysis to explore the ways in which fluctuation in international conditions, economic performance, and changes in the rules of the political game over the lifetimes of individual regimes have shaped the risk of regime breakdown. The results of this research address the long-standing theo retical debate over the breakdown and consolidation of political democracy as well as issues of relevance to the policy community concerned with the contemporary political dynamics of Eastern Europe and Latin America. ***