Institutional Inconsistency and Political Instability: Polity Duration, 1800–2000

TLDR

The study investigates how institutional structures shape political instability, hypothesizing that strongly autocratic or democratic regimes are most stable due to self‑enforcing equilibria. Polities are classified by executive election, executive constraints, and participation, and a log‑logistic duration model estimates survival ratios, revealing that institutionally inconsistent regimes lack self‑enforcing stability. Consistent institutions are significantly more stable, whereas dictatorships with high participation and constrained executives with small electorates are the least stable configurations.

Abstract

This article examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. It classifies polities as autocracies or democracies based on three institutional dimensions: election of the executive, constraints on executive decision‐making authority, and extent of political participation. It hypothesizes that strongly autocratic and democratic regimes will exhibit the greatest stability resulting from self‐enforcing equilibria, whereby the maintenance of a polity's institutional structure is in the interest of political elites, whether through autocratic or democratic control. Institutionally inconsistent regimes (those exhibiting a mix of institutional characteristics of both democracy and autocracy) lack these self‐enforcing characteristics and are expected to be shorter‐lived. Using a log‐logistic duration model, polity survival time ratios are estimated. Institutionally consistent polities are significantly more stable than institutionally inconsistent polities. The least stable political systems are dictatorships with high levels of political participation. The most unstable configuration for polities with an elected executive is one where the executive is highly constrained, but the electorate is very small.