Does democracy help babies survive in sub-Saharan Africa? By using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 African countries, I compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to identify the effect of democracy. In measuring democracy, I adopt a theoretically motivated definition of democracy: universal suffrage and contested elections for execu...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...

The Balkan political culture is the biggest problem in the democratization of South Eastern Europe. The basic characteristics of this culture, such as hostility, distrust, alienation and lack of consensus, are the main obstacles to democratization in this part of the world. The Balkan political culture was created as an expression of a specific development of the region through the history. Hig...

In the study of the Taiwanese labor movement, the prevailing consensus holds that democratization empowered the working class in Taiwan, while worker impact on democratization was minimal. While largely agreeing with this consensus, this paper seeks to offer some revisions by analyzing the rise of unionism in the China Petroleum Corporation (CPC). First, this paper argues that grass-roots milit...

In post-war societies external actors promote democracy within a broad framework of stateand nation-building, rule-of-Iaw building, and economic developrnent. But not all dernocracy promotion efforts succeed in an equal way. A eloser look at cases of intervention and democratization since 1945 helps us to account for this variation. Cases of democratization can be differentiated according to th...

The argument that democratization can bring about war is a powerful critique suggesting limits to the linkage between democracy and peace. This research examines this claim. Our findings demonstrate that democratizing polities are substantially less war prone than previously argued. By focusing on the characteristics of the transition process, we show that as contemporary polities become more d...

T H E IDEA that democracies never fight wars against each other has become an axiom for many scholars. It is, as one scholar puts it, "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations." This "law" is invoked by American statesmen to justify a foreign policy that encourages democratization abroad. In his 1994 State ofthe Union address. President Clinton asserted that n...