MT09 - Week 4 essay plan - Democratisation breakdown

Some ideas to talk about in the class.

The framework we are being given to understand regime breakdown.
Firstly what is a regime?
Someone/something/some group of people has control over the institutions of state, the departments of government and (possibly) the military
Having stronger control over more institutions/functions leads to stronger state power
Usually some political elites will direct the institutions. Why do they institutions listen to them? Because the regime has enough legitimacy or coercive power
If the regime has legitimacy in the eyes of the military it can probably coerce all other departments. If not, the other departments may have split loyalties between the regime and the military.
The military elites may be interested in a number of things - they need to retain legitimacy among their troops. Cannot therefore repress a majority of the population actively.
Popular support aids legitimacy of the regime

If the regime loses sufficient legitimacy to control the state institutions and in particular the military, it faces regime breakdown
If it doesn't have legitimacy it can try coercion (so long as it maintains the apparatus of coercion)

We can think of legitimacy in terms of five arenas (Linz and Stepan, 1996) - political, economic, civil society, rule of law, state apparatus (including the military?)

Breakdown led by the public comes either through civil society or through (ordinary people) circumventing the rule of law


Why does democracy not emerge?
In some cases - because there is not sufficient economic and social development. Borrowing from development theory, we can think of the poverty traps that consign countries to low development. Having the natural resource curse; being landlocked with bad neighbours; conflict trap; poor governance. 3 and 4 can be self perpetuating. 1 and 2 are structural factors. Natural resource trap, from Boix theory, can lead to increased costs of democratisation as well as the economic impact.
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