The role of collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy

Abstract

The role of citizens' collective action for the emergence and consolidation of democracy is generally analysed within bottom-up theories. However, top-down theories show that elites might impede or promote both democracy and collective action through a set of strategies which are often unobserved and vary over time. Democratic persistence and change require then to be assessed in a dynamic framework which considers both citizens and elites' strategies. For such reason, on a large sample of countries in the period 1971-2014, we jointly estimate the probability of collective action and democracy using a Structural Dynamic Model. This allows us to account for the dynamic nature of the two political phenomena under investigation by controlling for their persistence, for initial conditions and time-varying unobserved heterogeneity. We find that collective action matters for the emergence of democracy but not for its consolidation which seems to be related to more structural economic factors.