Economic crisis and regime transitions from within
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221145556 |
| Author | Vilde Lunnan Djuve,Carl Henrik Knutsen |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221145556
Journal of Peace Research
2024, Vol. 61(3) 446 –461
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221145556
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1225162JPR0010.1177/00223433221145556Journal of Peace ResearchDjuve & Knutsen
research-article2023
Regular Article
Economic crisis and regime transitions
from within
Vilde Lunnan Djuve
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Carl Henrik Knutsen
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Abstract
We study how economic crises relate to the likelihood of experiencing regime changes ‘from within’; that is,
transitions brought about, in part or fully, by actors in the incumbent regime. While historically common and
influencing the political trajectories of many countries, such processes are far less studied than regime transitions
forced by non-incumbent actors, such as coups or revolutions. We synthesize previous arguments and further specify
how crises can incentivize leaders to change the regime from within due to two mechanisms. First, crises create
windows of opportunity for leaders to pursue transitions they inherently prefer, for instance through self-coup.
Second, crises sometimes allow opposition actors to mobilize and threate n the regime, forcing incumbents to
liberalize. We leverage new data on timing and mode of regime change for more than 2000 regimes from about
200 countries, during the period 1789–2018. Employing different measurement strategies, estimators, control
variables and other specification choices, we find fairly robust evidence that economic crises are related to transitions
from within. However, when we distinguish between liberalizing and non-liberalizing guided transitions, we only
find that economic crises systematically relate to the latter, suggesting that the window of opportunity mechanism
may be especially pertinent in many contexts.
Keywords
economic crisis, incumbent-guided transition, regime change, self-coup
Introduction
Economic crises are associated with different kinds of
upheaval. Crises bring increased unemployment, job
insecurity and income loss. But they also spur political
upheaval, from government change in democracies
(Lindvall, 2017) to civil war onset (Hegre & Sambanis,
2006). Cross-national studies have even linked economic
crises to increased risk of regime change (Geddes, Wright
& Frantz, 2018; Djuve, Knutsen & Wig, 2020). A plau-
sible explanation is that economic crises – for instance
through increasing grievances in the population (Gurr,
1970) – mobilize opposition against the regime, which,
in turn, leads to forced regime change. Indeed, empirical
studies report evidence that economic crises are related to
heightened risks of revolutions (Knutsen, 2014) and
coups d’e
´tat (Gassebner, Gutmann & Voigt, 2016).
Yet, revolutions and coups are far from the only
modes through which regimes die, and the aggregated
relationship could reflect that crises drive also other
modes of regime change. Regime changes often come
about through processes where the regime incumbents
themselves guide the transition. Globally, over the last
two centuries, such ‘transitions from within’ have been
about as common as coups, and far more common than
revolutions. Transitions from within have thus shaped
political development and the current institutional
framework in numerous autocracies and democracies.
Nonetheless, these processes (and their potential deter-
minants) remain far less studied than coups and
Corresponding author:
v.l.djuve@stv.uio.no
Djuve & Knutsen 447
revolutions. In this article, we address this gap by asking:
do incumbent-guided regime transitions become more
likely when a country experiences an economic crisis? If
no, this would present an important qualification to the
notion that crises genera te different kinds of political
instability. If yes, this would add to the notion that crises
endanger regime survival, but specify that this is not only
(or even predominantly) due to crises spurring external
actors to directly force regime change.
We argue and show empirically that economic crises
do, indeed, spur processes of regime change that origi-
nate from ‘within’ the regime. This subset of regime
changes includes, first, liberalization processes of previ-
ously autocratic regimes that are managed by incumbent
regime elites (e.g. Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006). Sec-
ond, it includes other incumbent-guided transition pro-
cesses unaccompanied by substantial changes in degree
of democracy, such as managed changes from a person-
alist regime to an institutionalized one-party autocracy
(e.g. Geddes, Wright & Frantz, 2018). Finally, it includes
self-coups, where a sitting leader concentrates power in
his/her own hands under a more autocratic regime (e.g.
Svolik, 2015). Despite this heterogeneity, these processes
are all managed by representatives of the sitting regime
and – we propose – are all more likely to occur immedi-
ately after an economic crisis.
We synthesize and further develop insights from
existing arguments, elaborating on the conditions
under which economic crises likely spur transitions
from within. Previous arguments have been restricted
to particular types of transitions from within, especially
elite-guided democratic transitions (e.g. Acemoglu &
Robinson, 2006). Our argument builds on important
insights from these contributions, but addresses the
more general question: why would incumbents accept
changes to their current regimes, and why would they
more often do so after economic crises? We propose
that economic crises can motivate leaders to change the
regime through two main mechanisms. First, crises
sometimes weaken opposition actors, increase general
distress, and create windows of opportunity for changing
the regime in a direction that leaders inherently prefer.
Democratically elected leaders who use crises as a pre-
text for self-coups – the most common source of
democratic breakdown in recent decades (Lu
¨hrmann
& Lindberg, 2019; Svolik, 2019) – is one example.
Second, crises sometimes mitigate the regime’s power
resources and help opposition actors to mobilize. In
such circumstances, incumbents might prefer to nego-
tiate regime change with the opposition as a lesser evil,
to avoid direct confrontation.
Still, our main contribution is empirical. We are una-
ware of any similar large-N study that exclusively focuses
on processes of regime change from within and how they
relate to economic crises (or other potential determi-
nants). This lack of empirical studies is not due to regime
changes from within being rare phenomena – we show
that they outnumbered regime changes stemming from
military coups or revolutions through much of modern
history. Instead, the missing empirical studies presum-
ably come from the lack of comprehensive data tracking
these changes. This situation has changed with the recent
‘Historical Regime Data’ (HRD; Djuve, Knutsen &
Wig, 2020), embedded in the Varieties of Democracy
(V-Dem) dataset (Coppedge et al., 2019). We employ
these data – recording more than 2000 political regimes
and about 700 regime changes from within, from 201
countries and the period 1789–2018 – in our analysis.
We document a fairly robust aggregate relationship,
indicating that immediately after an economic crisis the
probability of regime change from within increases.
When disaggregating our outcome variable, we find a
clear link with self-coups and non-liberalizing guided
transitions, but not with incumbent-guided liberaliza-
tion episodes. Given the scope of our analysis and data
at hand, we cannot exclude all alternative explanations
and precisely identify any causal effect. Nonetheless,
our analysis yields evidence in line with the proposed
window of opportunity mechanism, but not as clearly in
line with the lesser evil mechanism. Hence, we find it
plausible that economic crises often drive incumbent-
guided transitions by providing sitting elites with an
opportunity to change the existing regime to a new one
that these elites prefer.
Literature review
Large-N analyses of regime change are plentiful, espe-
cially those that consider transitions between autocratic
and democratic regimes (e.g . Przeworski et al., 2000;
Boix, 2003; Svolik, 2015; Treisman, 2020; Miller,
2021). This holds true even if we consider studies
addressing the relevance of economic crises for such tran-
sitions. Several cross-country studies find that slow or
negative gross domestic product (GDP) per capita
growth is conducive to transitions in both directions
(Przeworski & Limongi, 1997; Burke & Leigh, 2010;
Kennedy, 2010; Bru
¨ckner & Ciccone, 2011; Ciccone,
2011; Aidt & Leon, 2015), whereas high inflation seems
to increase risk of democratic breakdown (Gasiorowski,
1995; Gasiorowski & Power, 1998; Bernhard, Nordstrom
& Reenock, 2001). Geddes, Wright & Frantz (2018)
2journal of PEACE RESEARCH XX(X)
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