Browsing by Author "Djuve, Vilde Lunnan"

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Economic Crisis and Regime Transitions from Within
(2019-11) Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Djuve, Vilde Lunnan; V-Dem Institute
We study how economic crises affect the likelihood of regime change brought about, in part or fully, by actors in the incumbent regime. While historically common, such processes remain far less studied than regime transitions forced by non-incumbent actors, such as coups or revolutions. We argue that economic crises may incentivize leaders to change the regime “from within” due to two different mechanisms, which we detail and illustrate with two cases. First, crises create “windows of opportunity” for leaders to change the regime in a direction they inherently prefer. Democratically elected leaders who use crises to conduct self-coups is one example. Second, economic crises sometimes allow for opposition actors to mobilize and threaten the regime with breakdown. In such circumstances, incumbents may prefer to change the regime from within to appease opponents in anticipation of even worse outcomes. We leverage new data on the timing and mode of regime change for more than 2000 regimes from about 200 countries, across 1789–2018, and find support for the hypothesis that economic crises induce transitions from within. However, when we distinguish incumbent-guided liberalization episodes from other guided transitions, including self-coups, we only find that economic crises systematically relate to the latter.
Patterns of Regime Breakdown since the French Revolution
(2018) Djuve, Vilde Lunnan; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Wig, Tore; V-Dem Institute
We present a new dataset comprising more than 1900 regimes in 197 polities over the time period 1789-2016. We use this dataset to describe dierent historical patterns of regime duration globally, leveraging ne-grained measures on when regimes started and ended and a nuanced scheme of dierent modes of regime breakdown. To mention a few patterns, we display how the frequency of regime breakdown, and particular modes of breakdown, have followed cyclical rather than linear patterns across modern history and that the most common modes, overall, are coups d'etat and incumbent-guided transformations of regimes. Further, we evaluate whether selected economic and political-institutional features are systematically associated with breakdown. We nd robust evidence that low income levels, slow or negative economic growth, and having intermediate levels of democracy predict higher chances of regime breakdown, although these factors are more clearly related to regime breakdown during some periods of modern history than others. When disaggregating dierent models of breakdown, we nd notable dierences for these predictors, with low income levels, for example, being strongly related to regime breakdowns due to popular uprisings, whereas intermediate levels of democracy clearly predict regime breakdowns due to coups and incumbent-guided regime transitions.