This paper presents a new approach for studying sequences across combinations of binary and ordinal variables. The approach involves three novel methodologies (frequency analysis, graphical mapping of changes between ...

What explains successful democratization? This paper makes four contributions towards providing more sophisticated answers to this question. Building on the comparative case study and large-N literature, it first presents ...

This paper presents a new method inspired by evolutionary biology for analyzing longer sequences of requisites for the emergence of particular outcome variables across numerous combinations of ordinal variables in social ...

What determines countries’ successful transition to democracy? Research has focused on socioeconomic and institutional factors, yet the assumption that political liberalization has to precede democratization has not been ...

How does the order in which liberalization unfolds a ect the likelihood for a successful democratic transition? Dahl was among the rst to argue that the sequence matters for the outcome when it comes to democratization. ...

What explains successful democratization? Answering this requires that researchers identify not only countries that successfully transitioned to democracy, but also those that began to liberalize—that initiated institutional ...

Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as "revolutions" and, though they have identied many of them, they have rarely ...