Playing Musical Chairs: The Role of Elite Support during Democratic Transition

Abstract

What role does the support of elite groups play in sustaining democratic transition? While the literature on elite defections has emphasized internal ruptures within regime coalitions as triggers for democratization, less attention has been paid to how elite dynamics shape the success of democratic transitions once they begin. This thesis argues that elite support during transition is both dynamic and interest-based. Drawing from a novel panel dataset covering 135 episodes of democratic transition between 1900 and 2019, I conduct logistic and time-to-event analyses to investigate the relationship between elite group support and democratic transition, focusing on three such groups. The results show that military support decreases the probability of transition by 9.2%, while business elite support has the opposite result, increasing it by 8.9%. Party elite support, instead, proves crucial as transition is ongoing: At any given point, countries where the party elites support the regime are approximately 58% more likely to complete their transition successfully compared to those without party elite support. By disaggregating elite groups and tracking their changing support through transition episodes, this study adds nuance to the current scholarship on democratization and points at the role of elite support realignment as a potential driving factor of successful democratic transitions