Article: Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success

Abraham Diskin, Hanna Diskin, and Reuven Y. Hazan, "Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success" ("International Political Science Review", 26 [3], July 2005: pp. 291-309):

http://ips.sagepub.com/content/26/3/291

Abstract: "Most studies of democratic stability are based within either the socioeconomic or the politico-institutional tradition, but usually not on both. This article combines the two approaches. In all, 11 variables associated with democratic stability are divided into four groups (institutional, societal, mediating, and extraneous) and examined in 30 cases of democratic collapse and 32 cases of stable democracies. Five variables prove to be the most influential on the fate of democracies. When a country scores negatively on four of these five variables it is almost doomed to collapse. Some of the variables prove to be correlated in an opposite way to that which has been suggested in the literature."

Unfortunately, I could not access the full text of the article.

Abraham Diskin is Professor and Reuven Y. Hazan is Associate Professor, both in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Hanna Diskin, the Director General of Maggie Publishers, Jerusalem, also lectures in that department.