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

9511509 Remmer通过关注体制安排和政权可持续性之间的关系，该项目旨在弥合旧的宏观社会对政治民主的理解与强调不确定性、结合条件和或有选择的当代工作之间的差距。这项研究重新评估了关于民主稳定依赖于经济表现的传统观点，并测试了一种理论替代方案，该方案考虑了政治民主和威权主义的不同优势和弱点，以及民主制度之间的制度差异。最重要的概念是，制度作为行为的背景决定因素，一方面在系统性和结构性力量之间进行调解，另一方面在个人政治行为者之间进行调解。该项目包括三个主要组成部分。首先，这项研究需要开发和分析关于拉丁美洲1945-1994年期间政治机构、选举结果和经济业绩的数据库，该数据库将与其他感兴趣的研究人员共享。其次，本研究详细阐述并检验了一组横截面回归模型，该模型将政权的持久性与国际政治背景、国内经济表现和政治制度这三个主要变量集联系起来。这些模型将解决有关专制和民主政治秩序相对脆弱的悬而未决的问题，并为估计经济和体制力量对政治民主可持续性的相对贡献奠定基础。第三，这项研究利用生存分析来探索国际形势的波动、经济表现和政治游戏规则的变化如何塑造了政权崩溃的风险。这项研究的结果解决了长期存在的关于政治民主的崩溃和巩固的理论辩论，以及与关注东欧和拉丁美洲当代政治动态的政策界相关的问题。***

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. ***