International Integration and Democratization

This article examines the relationships between transitions to and from democracy and membership in major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), ratification of key human-rights treaties, and integration into the global economy while controlling for a variety of domestic factors. The findings show that for the most part, participation in the major IGOs and the United Nations' human-rights regime has made little difference to the chances that countries would attempt or sustain democracy. Participation in regional human-rights treaties in Africa and the Americas is linked to better prospects for democracy, but this association appears to stem from regional trends of which those pacts are emblematic, rather than mechanisms specific to the pacts themselves. Finally, entanglement in the global economy – as indicated by thicker trade flows and membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then World Trade Organization (WTO) – seems to have had a stronger effect on the prospects for democracy than these other forms of international integration, but not always in the beneficent direction posited by liberal theorists. While participation in the GATT/WTO is associated with better prospects for the establishment and persistence of democracy, foreign trade itself is linked to the persistence of domestic political regimes of either stripe, democratic and non-democratic. All errors are the author's own. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the CIA or any other US government agency. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US government authentication or information or CIA endorsement of the author's views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information. Notes 1. For examples, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992), and Marc Plattner, ‘Globalization and Self-Government’, Journal of Democracy Vol. 13, No. 3 (2002), pp. 54–67. 2. ‘Event history analysis’ refers to a set of statistical techniques concerned with explaining the occurrence and timing of qualitative changes in the condition of individuals at risk of experiencing those changes. These techniques are commonly used in biomedical and sociological research to study events such as disease recurrence, career changes, and marriage and divorce. See Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Bradford S. Jones, Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3. The reference is to Karl Popper's philosophy of science as described in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). 4. These counts are based on the measures described in the Research Design section of this paper, and they only include countries with populations larger than 500,000. For similar counts, see Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World and Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5. These figures were derived from the Penn World Tables and the World Bank's World Development Indicators. 6. These figures were derived from five-year tallies of international memberships produced by Monty Marshall of George Mason University. 7. Philippe Schmitter, ‘The International Context of Contemporary Democratization’, Stanford Journal of International Affairs (Fall/Winter 1993), p. 7, describes this switched version of the story as ‘inverted Kantianism’, referring to Immanuel Kant's claim in his 1795 pamphlet that ‘republics’ were especially likely to promote international trade. 8. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962). 9. Peter Gourevich, ‘The Second Image Reversed’, International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Autumn 1978), pp. 881–912. See also Judith Goldstein, ‘International Institutions and Domestic Politics: GATT, WTO, and the Liberalization of International Trade’, pp. 133–60 in Anne O. Krueger (ed.), The WTO as an International Organization (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Robert D. Putnam, ‘Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games’, International Organization, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1988), pp. 427–60; and Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 10. Quan Li and Rafael Reuveny, ‘Economic Globalization and Democracy: An Empirical Analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2003), pp. 29–54. 11. Nita Rudra, ‘Globalization and the Strengthening of Democracy in the Developing World’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2005), pp. 704–30. 12. Ibid., p. 711. 13. Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968) and Dankwart A. Rustow's ‘Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (April 1970), pp. 337–63 are generally credited with shifting the field toward examining the process of political change in this manner. In Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), Guillermo A. O'Donnell offers a similar critique of the all-countries, all-years design as part of his explanation for how modernization theory misunderstood the prospects for democratic breakdown in some relatively wealthy yet still ‘developing’ countries. 14. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 35. 15. Mark J. Gasiorowski and Timothy J. Power, ‘The Structural Determinants of Democratic Consolidation: Evidence from the Third World’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 31, No. 6 (1998), pp. 740–71; and Przeworski et al. (note 4). 16. For a thoughtful discussion of the various causal processes and outcomes often lumped together under the ‘diffusion’ label, see Zachary Elkins and Beth Simmons, ‘On Waves, Clusters, and Diffusion: A Conceptual Framework’, Annals (American Academy of Political and Social Science, APSS), Vol. 598 (March 2005), pp. 33–51. 17. Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, ‘Diffusion Is No Illusion’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2006), pp. 463–89. 18. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Michael T. Ward, ‘Diffusion and the International Context of Democratization’, International Organization, Vol. 60 (Fall 2006), pp. 911–33. 19. Barbara Wejnert, ‘Diffusion, Development, and Democracy 1800–1999’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 70 (February 2005), pp. 53–81. 20. David L. Epstein, Robert H. Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen, and Sharyn O'Halloran, ‘Democratic Transitions’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2006), pp. 551–69. 21. Harvey Starr, ‘Democratic Dominoes: Diffusion Approaches to the Spread of Democracy in the International System’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1991), pp. 356–81. 22. Jay Ulfelder and Michael Lustik, ‘Modelling Transitions To and From Democracy’, Democratization, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2007), pp. 351–87. 23. Jon Pevehouse, ‘Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization’, International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 3 (2002), pp. 515–49. 24. Antoaneta Dimitrova and Geoffrey Pridham, ‘International Actors and Democracy Promotion in Eastern and Central Europe: The Integration Model and Its Limits’, Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5 (2004), pp. 91–112. 25. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, ‘Linkage versus Leverage: Rethinking the International Dimension of Regime Change’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2006). 26. Narottam Gaan, ‘United States, Globalization, and the International System: Economic and Political Challenges’, International Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2006), pp. 305–16. 27. Helen V. Milner with Keiko Kubota, ‘Why the Move to Free Trade? Democracy and Trade Policy in the Developing Countries’, International Organization, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2005), pp. 107–43. 28. A discrete-time logistic regression model is just a logistic regression model estimated from a sample that only includes individuals at risk of experiencing the event of interest, and that relies on periodic (e.g., annual) rather than continuous-time observation. Here, for example, that means my model of transitions from autocracy to democracy is estimated from a sample that only includes countries that were under authoritarian rule on 1 January. Duration measures are included in my models to address the serial autocorrelation issues discussed in Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan N. Katz, and Richard Tucker, ‘Taking Time Seriously: Time-Series–Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 4 (1998), pp. 1260–88. For more on the trade-offs involved in different approaches to duration dependence in discrete-time event history models, see also Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (note 2) and Kazuo Yamaguchi, Event History Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991). 29. This criterion means that cases where the chief executive dismisses an elected legislature and rules by decree, as occurred in Ecuador in 1970, Peru in 1992, and Russia in 1993, are treated as transitions from democracy to autocracy, even if that chief executive was competitively elected. It also means that episodes of democracy do not begin until both the sitting chief executive and sitting legislature have been chosen in competitive elections. This affects the timing of the transition in cases such as Moldova, where an uncontested election for president in 1991 and then constitutional changes in the mid-1990s meant the two did not come together until 1997. 30. Tampering here can refer to direct manipulations of the vote count, such as ballot-stuffing or widespread vote-buying. It can also refer to other actions in advance of elections, such as the manipulation of the voter rolls or registration process, the extensive use of state resources in favor of specific parties or candidates, the frequent harassment of opposition candidates by state agents, or substantial restrictions on speech and assembly. 31. See Ulfelder and Lustik (note 21). 32. Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Przeworski et al. (note 4); Kirk Bowman, Fabrice Lehoucq, and James Mahoney, ‘Measuring Political Democracy: Case Expertise, Data Adequacy, and Central America’, Comparative Political Studies Vol. 38, No. 8 (2005), pp. 939–70; and Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks, and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, ‘Classifying Political Regimes in Latin America, 1945–1999’, Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001), pp. 37–65. 33. Przeworski et al. (note 4), pp. 20–5. 34. ‘We chose to take a cautious stance’, they write (ibid., p. 25), ‘that is, to avoid type-II errors’, or errors of commission. 35. Pevehouse (note 22). 36. This criterion led me to exclude the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from my research. For a careful analysis concluding that NATO enlargement has not played a role in the spread of democracy, see Dan Reiter, ‘Why NATO Enlargement Does Not Spread Democracy’, International Security, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2001), pp. 41–67. 37. See www.aseansec.org. 38. See http://www.thecommonwealth.org/Internal/20596/about_us/. 39. Stata's logit command deals with this estimation problem by omitting all of the EU member countries from the analysis when I attempt to include an EU indicator in the model. 40. These figures are reported in the OSCE/ODIHR's Annual Report 2006. 41. For a discussion of the mechanisms involved and the frequency with individuals have taken advantage of them, see pp. 809–10 of Edith Brown Weiss, ‘Invoking State Responsibility in the Twenty-First Century’, The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 96, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 798–816. 42. Article 25 of the ICCPR states: ‘Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 and without unreasonable restrictions: (a) To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives; (b) To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors; (c) To have access, on general terms of equality, to public service in his country’. 43. Li and Rueveny (note 9) and Rudra (note 10) also use foreign direct investment as a share of GDP as a measure of economic integration, pulling their data for this measure from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. I chose not to include that variable in my analysis because the missing-data problem is significantly worse for this variable than it is for other economic measures, even per capita income. Because of listwise deletion, inclusion of this variable in my model of transitions from democracy to autocracy reduces the size of the sample by nearly one-fifth, from about 2,200 to about 1,800 observations. Furthermore, these data appear to be missing in a nonrandom way, as that fifth of the observations includes roughly one-third of the transition events. Typical for economic data, the problem is even worse among the country-years I identify as episodes of autocracy. Under these circumstances, I took a cautious approach and restricted my analysis to variables with less severe missing-data problems. 44. As a robustness check, I also tested a trade-openness measure that was adjusted for population size, land area, and status as a landlocked country, all factors that tend to drive down a country's foreign trade flows relative to GDP. The results were essentially the same as those reported below. 45. These figures and the data used in my analysis are based on lists posted to the WTO's website, www.wto.org. In my analysis, states that were engaged in formal negotiations for accession or otherwise described as having observer status were considered non-members. 46. For a scholarly treatment of this organization's history, see John H. Barton, Judith L. Goldstein, Timothy E. Josling, and Richard H. Steinberg, The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Politics, Law, and Economics of the GATT and the WTO (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 47. Mary Comerford Cooper's ‘International Organizations and Democratization: Testing the Effect of GATT/WTO Membership’, presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA (2002), represents a notable exception, and I discuss her findings in the Results section of this paper. 48. Ulfelder and Lustik (note 21). 49. This discussion leans heavily on Chapter 5 in Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and Violence (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). 50. I think this conclusion is also consistent with findings from recent research by Neumayer, who looked at the impact of accession to these treaties on governments' human rights records and found that ratification only improved performance in countries that were already fairly democratic. See Eric Neumayer, ‘Do International Human Rights Treaties Improve Respect for Human Rights?’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 49, No. 6 (2005), pp. 925–53. 51. My findings on GATT/WTO membership contradict Cooper's (note 46). She applies dynamic probit models to data on regime transitions during the period 1950–1990 and concludes that formal participation in the global free-trade regime has had no impact on the likelihood of transitions in either direction. The contrasting results do not appear to stem from the difference in periods of observation; when I restrict my sample to the Cold War years, I actually find a stronger and still positive association between participation in the GATT and prospects for a transition to democracy, and a somewhat weaker but still negative association with the risk of democratic breakdown. The difference probably has something to do with the measures of regime type used to construct the dependent variable. Cooper uses transition data published in Przeworski et al. (note 4), whose alternation and consolidation rules are problematic for survival analysis. While I would hardly pretend to have the last word on this subject, I do believe my data offer a sounder platform for event history modeling, and thus a more reliable test of the association. 52. Graham T. Allison, Jr. and Robert P. Beschel, Jr., ‘Can the United States Promote Democracy?’ Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 1 (1992), pp. 81–98; and Levitsky and Way (note 24). 53. This result is also robust to a fixed-effects design, which focuses exclusively on within-country variation. Where the unconditional logistic regression takes into account cross-sectional as well as longitudinal differences in prospects for democracy among members and non-members, the fixed-effects model effectively assesses whether joining the GATT/WTO changed prospects for democratization within countries. The drawback is that the fixed-effects model excludes countries with no variation on the dependent variable, so, in this analysis, it radically alters the sample in some undesirable ways. Still, the fact that this result holds in a fixed-effects model reinforces the impression that joining the global trade regime is historically associated with improvement in a country's prospects for democratization. 54. Whether or not those institutional reforms actually foster more foreign trade, and whether expanded trade accelerates economic growth, are subjects that economists continue to debate. On the effects of WTO membership on trade, see Andrew Rose, ‘Which International Institutions Promote International Trade?’ Review of International Economics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2005), pp. 682–98; and Arvind Subramanian and Shang-Jin Wei, ‘The WTO Promotes Trade, Strongly but Unevenly’, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Working Paper No. 5122 (July 2005). On the relationship between trade flows and growth, see David Dollar and Aart Kraay, ‘Trade, Growth, and Poverty’, unpublished paper (2002) available online at http://rru.worldbank.org/Documents/PapersLinks/442.pdf for evidence in the affirmative; for a skeptical view, see Francisco Rodriguez and Dani Rodrik, ‘Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic's Guide to Cross-National Evidence’, NBER Working Paper No. 7081 (1999). That those relationships are not plainly evident, and that my models also control for both wealth and growth, suggest the observed link between participation in the trade regime and democratization cannot be attributed to the effects of membership on economic growth. 55. See note 24. 56. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 93–112. 57. Wayne Sandholtz and Mark M. Gray, ‘International Integration and National Corruption’, International Organization, Vol. 57, No. 4 (2003), pp. 761–800. 58. To check for selection bias, I also tried estimating separate models of transitions from democracy to autocracy for GATT/WTO members and non-members. The number of transition events in each set is too small to produce reliable estimates with multiple-variable logistic regression, but I thought it worth noting that the directionality of the coefficients, including the one for trade openness, was consistent across the two sets. 59. See notes 9 and 10. 60. Unfortunately, the absence of reliable time-series–cross-sectional data is a major impediment to analysis of all of these factors in statistical models of rare events such as regime transitions. Most data series on these topics are temporally shallow, and the absence of data is often related to a country's level of economic development and the nature of its regime. Under these circumstances, even the most sophisticated imputation techniques will yield data of questionable validity. Consequently, I expect that well-designed comparative will continue to more findings on these in and Social Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). of States, and the for Democratic Consolidation in International Political Science Review, Vol. No. 2 (2001), pp. On this see M. ‘The to Democratic The American Journal of International Law, Vol. No. 1 (1992), pp. and and (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Robert H. Bates, Prosperity and The Political of Development (New York: W. W. Norton, p. on Jay Ulfelder is by Science International as research for the Political Instability Task an research by the US Central

Democracy · Democracy promotion · Democratization · Development economics · Economic integration · Economics · Human rights · International trade · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Ratification · Regional Integration · International Development and Aid · Law

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